Does Facebook know I'm scraping it with PhantomJS and can it change its website to counter me?

Question

So, maybe I\'m being paranoid.

I\'m scraping my Facebook timeline for a hobby project using PhantomJS. Basically, I wrote a program that finds all of my ads by querying

Answer 1

It is perfectly possible to detect PhantomJS even if the useragent is spoofed. There are plenty of litte ways in which it differs from other browsers, among others:

• Wrong order of headers
• Lack of media plugins and latest JS capabilities
• PhantomJS-specific methods, like window.callPhantom
• PhantomJS name in the stack trace

and many others.

Please refer to this excellent article and presentation linked there for details: https://blog.shapesecurity.com/2015/01/22/detecting-phantomjs-based-visitors/

Maybe puppeteer would be a better fit for your needs as it is based on a real cutting-edge Chromium browser.