I'm a student studying data mining. And I'm facing a trouble.
For my analysis, I tried to crawl users' personal interests and their favorite movies, music, etc. I don't need their real names or any sensitive data, but it seems like I need to get permission from each user to be able to obtain these information. I thought I could gain it easily since they are accessible through the Facebook surfing.
So what I want to ask is:
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Is it possible for me to acquire user's interest information without having their permission?
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Do I have to use FQL to crawl those data? Am I thinking the right way? I'm reading the manual given by Facebook. However, since I'm not that good English reader, I don't have 100% comprehension.
Thanks for reading this terrible English, and I wish to have some hints from you guys.
Thanks! 🙂
Best Answer
Facebook let you access data about users who authorized your application and data about their friends (and not friends of friends for example).
Once a user authorizes your application you can access his basic information (like id, name, gender) and other data he made public. For anything more you'll have to ask for the different permissions from the user, once granted by him you can access it.
You can also ask from an app user for permissions regarding his friends, if he grants you those then you can also query facebook about data of his friends.
Check out the permissions documentation to see what you can access and which permissions you need to ask for.
You can use FQL to extract data from facebook, but you can also use the Graph API (or more specifically: User object). For example, to get the interests of the logged in user you just issue an http request to:
You'll have to get the user_interest permission for that of course..
I recommend using the Graph Api Explorer for testing graph api calls (or event FQL ones) i.e.: User Interests Example.