I want to know how, for an arbitrary facebook user, given their facebook ID, can I go about accessing the detailed profile information they make public to users?
I have a list of facebook profile IDs and I want to compile some statistics such as the distribution of number of photos and the distribution of number of likes etc. For those who have made the information public, I can view this information (number of likes, number of photos the user is tagged in, etc) as a logged-in user.
How do I access the same information as an application? Some sources tell me that I need to explicitly request each user’s permission for each field I am interested in. This is clearly infeasible if I have something like 40,000 random users.
Is there any way out, or am I stuck at this point?
You can retrieve their public information by visiting / requesting http://graph.facebook.com/PROFILE_ID
For more detailed information, you can also take a look at the FQL Users table. It appears their is additional information that is available with “any valid access token” (which could be one that you authorize for yourself, similar to you being logged in to facebook) http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/user/ . Note there is still a long list of exceptions.
Anything that says you need permission you will be unable to access. To retrieve that information the user has to explicitly authorize your application and the necessary permissions.