Facebook Crawler Speaks Back

Last week we ran a story about Facebook suing to get a crawled dataset offline. This week we have a bit of a response written by Pete Warden, the guy who actually did the crawling. He followed robots.txt, and then Facebook's lawyers went after him. It's actually a quite interesting little tale and worth your time.

Comments

Re:Arachnophobia

[OnlyJedi]

From the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Section 3 "Safety":

2. You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.

The question then becomes how enforceable is the agreement? Sure, if he has an account Facebook can close it, but if he is just accessing Facebook without an account do they have a case? Last I saw you can browse parts of profiles without being logged in, and without ever agreeing to any terms.

Re:Pretty naive

[elrous0]

I hope you're being sarcastic. If not, I have some bad news for you.

Facebook's privacy policy

[whencanistop]

Facebook's privacy policy says:

“Everyone” Privacy Setting. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

I'd also like to point out in their terms:

When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.

Re:Pretty naive

[Bakkster]

Actually, I believe all of this data was publicly accessable, even without an account. This is part of the updated privacy controls (which set most everything to public by default if someone never adjusted their privacy). Thus it seems a ToS would never have applied, though FB obviously wants it to.

Re:Mark Zuckerberg

[internic]

Hmm, what's this about hacking and journalists? I haven't heard this particular facebook horror story.

I never read much into it, but Slashdot covered this story a while back: Facebook Founder Accused of Hacking Into Rivals' Email.