Can I retrieve info from users that are not friends of the authenticated user?

I'm just starting with Facebook Development and have a basic question开发者_Go百科. Can I retrieve info from users that are not friends of the authenticated user? For example, retrieve all facebook users that live in New York.

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For privacy reasons, you cannot retrieve info for arbitrary users, so you cannot get info for users that are not friends of the authenticated user. If you know a user's username, you can get some basic information, such their facebook ID, first and last names, gender, etc. by querying https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID, e.g. https://graph.facebook.com/dhirenp

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With the friends_hometown extended permission you can retrieve the home town for a user's friends. With the friends_location extended permission you can retrieve their currently listed city. You should also be able to query for a list of a user's friends who live in a particular city by querying the User FQL table ( https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/user/ )

Check https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ which lists all fields available for a user object and the permission necessary to retrieve it for the current user and their friends (where applicable - some permissions can not be given on behalf of a users' friends)

[but yes, as Dhiren says, this is only applicable for users that have authorised your app, or are friends with someone who has authorised your app (with the appropriate permissions) - there isn't a way to arbitrarily search like that]