"Dating" site imports 250,000 Facebook profiles, without permission
Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 03 February 2011
"Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating - unfortunately, without the user's control."
"Scraping people's information violates our terms," said Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of policy communications.
Moreover, it's a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about scraping of personal data that is quasi-public.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder, made his name at Harvard in 2003 by scraping the names and photos of fellow classmates off school servers to feed a system called FaceMash. With the photos, Zuckerberg created a controversial system that pitted one co-ed against another, by allowing others to vote on which one was better looking.
Seems like it's not so funny when others do what Zucky did. It would be interesting to hear the lawyers explain why Cirio and Ludovic deserve a punishment while their CEO did exactly the same before. Besides, claiming that it violates some terms of service isn't much of a defense when it's about public information anybody can see without consenting to those terms.