A secret API that finds when a partner is sleeping on Facebook is discovered

ByTrish Hamme

It is not recommended from the viewpoint of crime prevention because it leads to life rhythm and address being balanced when posting contents conforming to the actual life to SNS in detail. However, even if you are careful about this point, it is obvious that there are ways to be known about what kind of life rhythm, when you are sleeping, if you are a frequent user of Facebook became.

Literally words - Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
https://defaultnamehere.tumblr.com/post/139351766005/graphing-when-your-facebook-friends-are-awake


this isLiterally alexIt is revealed by the user who asserts.

Facebook has a green small dot that indicates whether the user is online. It is not impossible to check if a particular user is on-line if you keep watching this green dot forever. It was here that Mr. alex focused on.

Alex confirms from the source of the page what is working to make this dot visible. As a result of digging forward, we found out that there is a secret API that is not open to the public.

In this API, the activity history of chat on Facebook, the history of chat activity in the Facebook Messenger application for mobile, the status of Facebook application (online / offline / idle), the status of Facebook messenger, etc.UNIX timeIt was recorded with time stamp of.

Alex wrote a program to keep knocking on this API in Python and collect data. During the work, the API sometimes returned an answer "offline" even though the user is actually online. Based on the text-based data collected in this way,MatplotlibYaBokehThe figure below is a graphical representation using such as.

The horizontal axis shows the passage of time, and the vertical axis shows the activity obtained from the log. "Awake" "Asleep" is a point based on the activity, alex speculated that "This person slept here and it got up here." Since it is based on the history of activity in the site and the application to the end it will be greatly disconnected when "I have not accessed Facebook ever since I woke up", but as I asked an acquaintance, It seems that he was mostly hit.


The above figure is deliberately outputting a small output, and it is said that it will be about this size by Mr. alex.


These are just visualization of data that is normally transmitted when using Facebook, so anyone with the will and skills can do the same thing. On the other hand, since Facebook itself is also used for online management of users, it seems difficult to quit now.

Incidentally, alex seems to have been in the status of "online" all the time for the convenience of getting logs all the time. Running a script similar to alex can disturb the online situation.