A Facebook crawler based on interaction simulation and MHRW-DA

Data acquisition is a precondition to conduct online social network (OSN) research. Based on the interaction simulation, we have implemented a Facebook crawler with unbiased MHRW-DA (Metropolis-Hasting Random Walk with Delayed Acceptance) algorithm, which can obtain the complete friend list of a Facebook user. We make an analysis on the crawled dataset, and find out that (1) 34.2% of Facebook users have changed the default privacy setting, implying that the awareness of privacy protection of Facebook users has been greatly improved; (2) the percentage of female users in those that have changed the default privacy setting is higher than male by 16.8%, implying the awareness of privacy protection of female users is much higher than that of male.