Getting at Private Friend Lists

Facebook Privacy Settings Backdoor

Sometimes you will want to know who is on a private friend list. The most common reason for me is because I think that the person is a runner or important connection in a ring, so I want to know who he associates with.

This takes a little while and will probably never get you the entire friend list, so the list in question has to be important to you.

Facebook warns you in their TOS that while you may set particular privacy settings, they cannot control what your friends or apps do, and so what is not visible on your page may be visible in other areas of Facebook.

That is what this will show you how to exploit, without hacking or doing anything surreptitious.

This fellow has no friend list displayed, but it was important for me to know his friends….

If we click on the pictures though, often we can find that friends have commented on photos…

Here is the album, and any friends who have commented will be seen when we click on the photo….

About ten friends have commented here, and they will lead you to the rest…

Mouse over one of the blue hyperlinks and you’ll bring up the preview box, then click on the friend

Even though the subject’s friend list private, the friend’s is not, note we can “see all”

Once we are on the friend search page, we can filter the friend search by searching for common friends “search by friends of” between the friend and the subject….

Now if you put in your subject Facebook will return all of the common friends. Particularly with family members and ethnic groups living in the same geographic area, everyone knows everyone else, so you’ll reveal a lot of friends of your private subject…

• Repeat this process as desired with multiple known friends and copy/paste each friend list in Excel.

• When satisfied you have obtained most/enough, sort Excel

• Delete dupes, and you have 80-90% of your subject’s private friend list