A Facebook event collector framework for profile monitoring purposes

Abstract

Social networks have recently emerged to become vital tools for information and content dissemination among connections. Indeed, the immense increase of number of users of Facebook made it rise to become the largest existing social network with more than 1.2 billion active users. However, these numbers also rose the attention of hackers and attackers who aim at propagating malware and viruses for obtaining confidential information regarding social network users. In this manner, it is crucial that each Facebook user is able to easily access, control and analyse the information shared on the corresponding profile so that profile usage deviations can be more efficiently detected. However, despite the fact that Facebook allows an analysis of all user actions through the Timeline Review, this information is not comprehensively organized and there is no statistical analysis of the user generated data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework comprising a Facebook event collector, which by being provided with an authentication token for a user profile obtained through a Facebook application developed for this purpose, collects all the corresponding posted information and stores it in a relational database for \textit{a posteriori} analysis. Through the graphical interface of the developed application, users can access all stored information in a comprehensible manner, according to the type of event, thus facilitating the analysis of user behaviour. By storing each event with the corresponding timestamp, we are able to perform an efficient and comprehensive analysis of all posted contents and compute statistical models over the obtained data. In this manner, we can create a notion of normal usage profile and detect possible deviations which may be indicative of a compromised user account.