Have a Facebook Account? Read this
Afraid of identity theft on the web as it stands? Here’s more fuel to the fire. Robert Scoble, tech blogger and vlogger, today used an unreleased scraper to easily pull out friend information on his 5,ooo or so friends on Facebook. Facebook said this was against their terms of service and banned Robert. Robert was playing with the tool, and I don’t believe for a second he would use data for ill, but the damage is done. While he may no longer be a member of Facebook, he still holds a vast tome of information he has aggregated from his friend list.
Damien has written a good post on this and seems to think that only tech nerds and people who aren’t bored by the the post should skip it. I beg to differ. Everyone with a Facebook account should be aware of how easy it is for someone with a scraper tool to kick it off against a social network and harvest off member data for their own nefarious reasons. Check out Paul’s take on the situ too.
2008 will see this become a more frequent occurrence. This is a massive problem facing technologists and users alike.
EDIT: And Scoble has had his ban lifted. Jeremy brought my attention to it. His profile is live again as of my last check at 9:48pm(GMT).
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9 Responses to “Have a Facebook Account? Read this”
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“This is a massive problem facing technologists and users alike.” which is probably why Facebook prohibit (technically and via their terms of use) the harvesting of email addresses.
@PaulWalsh: True, but the info has moved out of Facebook’s terrain. So what, are Facebook just going to put their hands up and say, “Whoops, it’s against our TOS, we’ve banned the member in question - Sooorrryy!” ? I would like to see what Facebook plan to do to tackle this problem.
@Alexia I don’t think Robert actually managed to get anything that a Facebook application wouldn’t do for you. But I could be wrong. I do remember a friend telling me that he knew Facebook’s Privacy person and they were not only hot, but extremely serious about protecting people’s privacy. I doubt we’ll see court cases anytime soon though.
@Paul: Well as far as I know, Facebook apps don’t pull email addresses. I may be wrong here too. Something to check on.
They don’t. I didn’t realise until 15 minutes ago that Plaxo asked Robert to do what he did. They’re scum bags and I’m going to delete my account with them. If they can do that to another company, what are they willing to do with our information?!
Yeah. It’s a mad situation..
Cancel your Plaxo account if you care about privacy…
I wrote a blog post earlier today about Facebook disabling Robert Scoble?s account for attempting to extract his contacts’ information using a script.
Since writing my post and conversing with what felt like the universe on Twitter about the ma…
Interestingly, I was talking to the data protection registrar in December about the removal and subsequent use of Facebook data (from applications in particular) and whilst he had not yet sat down with Facebook, it was his opinion that under no circumstances was data allowed to be used for anything outside of facebook.
We give our permissions for the data to be accessed and used from within Facebook, not outside of it. This also rings true about the “correct” use of email addresses in email marketing - if a menmber subscribes to a car insurance newsletter it is wrong to then send them emails abotu double-glazing.
I expect to get more clarity sometime in January on the Facebook implications.
Paul
@PaulFabretti: Interesting. I guess we’ll have to wait until January to see what happens. One wonders if Facebook will be forced to reevaluate their foreign operations (in this, case the UK) after the DPR is done with his assessment.