Recorded Future and Facebook Chat Messages

We’ve received questions about a recent post on the <a href"http:="" bosnadev.com="" 2015="" 04="" 14="" facebook-chats-are-being-scanned-by-a-cia-funded-company="" "="" rel="noopener noreferrer">Bosnadev blog, which suggests Recorded Future followed a link from their Facebook Chat messages. We were very surprised by that claim, and immediately dug into our logs to investigate. Here’s what we found.

Our systems followed this URL after it was posted on a public site. Our system constantly explores links like this that are published on the Web. Our logs confirmed this is what happened in this specific case. It’s not related to any Facebook Chat messages containing this link. Our system doesn’t access that information. We’ve contacted Bosnadev directly to share more details.

This article was updated April 15, 2015 with the following paragraph.

Several commenters on the Bosnadev blog pointed out a paste that contained this URL, and was published shortly before our system explored the link. To us, it seems most likely someone involved in this project copied and posted part of a server log (formerly at http://pastebin.com/ukBvSKyw, now removed). While we don’t know for sure, we do know with 100% certainty this has nothing to do with Facebook Chat messages. We have zero interest in reading Facebook Chat messages with the Recorded Future service!