1. There is no such thing as a "pending" ban or Steam admin. Anyone threatening your account is a scammer trying to scare you. Read more.

Extrapolate Friend Lists of Private Profiles

Discussion in 'SteamRep General Discussion' started by boomerandzapper, May 23, 2015.

  1. boomerandzapper

    boomerandzapper Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    23
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:43768373
    I noticed that you are able to see if a private profile is a friend of someone else if that other person has a public profile. With this data it is possible to find the friend's list of people who have private profiles/friends only profiles.

    Thanks.
    boomerandzapper, May 23, 2015
    #1
  2. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

    Messages:
    5,859
    SteamRep Admin:
    STEAM_0:1:46187366
    In theory, we'd need to see all the profiles and friend lists of anyone who could possibly be a friend of that user, and they'd each need a public profile. Otherwise, the data would be incomplete.
    Lava, May 23, 2015
    #2
  3. Enstage

    Enstage SteamRep Admin Partner Community Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    4,705
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:52569926
    ^Expanding on what he said, for complete data you would need to collect the friends list of basically everyone on Steam. There are millions upon millions of accounts on Steam, this is the result of sending an API request for my friends list:

    http://pastebin.com/qULEN7QG

    Now multiple that by a couple o' million.
    Enstage, May 23, 2015
    #3
  4. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

    Messages:
    5,859
    SteamRep Admin:
    STEAM_0:1:46187366
    Considering we don't/can't record everyone on Steam, that's not feasible. And if we could, we still wouldn't find private profiles that are friends with other private profiles.
    Lava, May 23, 2015
    #4
    Enstage likes this.
  5. boomerandzapper

    boomerandzapper Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    23
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:43768373
    How about only for scammer's friends. How many scammers does this guy have added?
    boomerandzapper, May 23, 2015
    #5
  6. Enstage

    Enstage SteamRep Admin Partner Community Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    4,705
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:52569926
    This is confusing my brain a bit, but if I am thinking correctly this could work pretty easy, but it would look bad on people with private profiles.

    E.g. Lets say I have a private profile and 1000 friends, 10 of those are marked scammers, if you went to my profile on SR you would see only 10 people on my friends list who are all marked :/ That list of red would look very suspicious and raise questions.

    If you're going to do something, don't partially do it I guess :/
    Enstage, May 23, 2015
    #6
  7. SilentReaper(SR)

    SilentReaper(SR) Retired Staff

    Messages:
    11,991
    SteamRep Admin:
    STEAM_0:0:89705646
    Several reasons NOT to do this:
    - Privacy settings on a steam profile is with that circumvented. This would not be looked kindly upon by Valve. Hell, it might even revoke our Steam API access.
    - Steam API is "soft" limited to around 100.000 API calls a day. This would chew really fast thru that.
    - There are 200+ Million steam accounts. We really have NOT the data to find all profiles that [are/where] friends of a private profile.
    - Even IF we would have the data, its a LOT of server resources to go thru that much data on regular basis.
    - There is no real need for this.

    If you log into SteamRep, and then go to a private profile, you can open a historical view, and look if it ever was public, and view a historical friendslist. Sure, it can have changed in the mean time, but often not too much.

    Outside of that, if its regarding trading:
    - Have the rule that you will ignore invites/trades of private profiles
    - If you really need to trade with that profile: ask/demand that they set it public, and then view the profile on SteamRep and on a backpack viewer site like backpack.tf or for dota2 / cs:go, that retains HISTORICAL views for backpacks, so you can revisit it later.
    SilentReaper(SR), May 24, 2015
    #7
    Roudydogg1 likes this.