I have a question. You have a Facebook account. You submit your information to it. You know, your name, birthday, religion, likes, dislikes, addresses, phone numbers, etc. So do all your relatives and friends. Who owns everyone’s information? According to Facebook, not you.
Let’s say that you want to use another social network. MySpace.com, myYearBook.com, whatever. Should you have the ability to export your data from facebook and move it to whatever social network you want? So all/most of your profile information is transferred? According to Facebook, nope. The information, or at least the representation of the information is property of Facebook because you willingly submitted it to them.
Using an automated script to pull your data out and save it in a certain format to be imported to another service is a clear violation of the Terms of Service. It’s easily detectable. Unless you have a software package that adds a random delay between each page (to simulate “you reading it”), Facebook will detect that pages are being requested faster than a human could actually process the page information over a short period of time.
The same thing happened to Mr. Scoble. His account got disabled. I can see why Facebook does this from a proprietor standpoint, but why is everything always about the business and never about customer convenience?
Let’s say that you want to import all your friends’ email addresses and phone numbers to outlook or something of that nature. This is simply so you can easily contact your friends. Let’s say that you use a laptop and you travel to a wireless network (work/school?) where facebook might be blocked. But you need Paul’s email address to email him something for class. Oh no. Facebook is blocked. Facebook, by way of policy prohibits you from assembling external lists like this. This will also get you banned, because you’d need a program to crawl all of your friends’ profiles and grab the information. Easily detectable. Unless your software package does the above… and even then, probably still slightly detectable.
I can also see why facebook prohibits this. This would be a drain on bandwidth, as well this would encourage companies to do spam marketing campaigns by harvesting emails found on profiles. I mean, you gotta look at both sides of the picture, but shouldn’t there be a happy medium, somehow?
Related posts:
- How To Get the Old Facebook Back So, I’ve stumbled upon a trick to restore the old Facebook. I’d like to remind everyone who does this that Facebook can just as easily restore everyone’s back to the new Facebook and remove this workaround. I don’t know how … Continue reading →...
- The New Facebook Ah, yes. The Facebook redesign. it’s been out for quite some time now. Up until Friday I’ve had the option to still use the old Facebook, but my account has been since locked to the new Facebook. This is Facebooks … Continue reading →...
- Hilarious Facebook Group So, I just stumbled across a Facebook group that made me lol a little bit. It’s a group simply called ‘FUCK THE POLICE’ yup. That’s right. All capital letters. According the group profile, they are a “political organization.” One more … Continue reading →...
