Scoble, Identity Thief [Scrape / Hack Facebook]
If you’ve been reading any tech news today, you probably heard that Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook for hacking it with an automated scraper to get his Facebook friends into Plaxo. Later today, Facebook reinstated his account after warning him to “refrain from running these types of scripts again.”
What was Scoble after? Your names, email addresses, and birthday. Information that he is allowed access to inside Facebook, but which his many of 5,000 so-called friends might not want hauled outside and stored with another company. Buzzmachine is right when they label him an identity thief in What he says:
I want Facebook to protect my email address. I don’t want Scoble downloading it and giving it over to Plaxo, a brand and company I will never, never trust and would never choose to do business with or hand data to on my own. So much of the reaction to this little incident gets it backwards; there has been much talk about how we should be able to get our data out of Facebook and that’s fine but we also need to protect our data from others making use of it without our permission and that’s what this is about in the end.
There’s a reason that I have set my privacy to avoid these things–in addition to defriending everyone I don’t actually know and trust. I don’t want people knowing where I live (as I’ve received death threats, prank calls, and various harassments that are more trouble to sort out then just avoid). I don’t want them knowing my email, phone number, or birthday. And I certainly would get pissed off to see someone harvesting them en-masse. As I wrote in Cornell violates mass student privacy, “Taken one-by-one, this kind of directory information is completely useless and publicly available. But when taken in aggregate form, the contact information is a secret.”
So, in mass-downloading his Facebook friends’ information, Scoble violated the Terms of Service, the implicit trust relationships he had with his Facebook friends, their privacy, and their identities. Now he claims that the information will be removed after their tests are finished, but at this point it’s too late. The cat (our identities) is out of the bag.
p.s., Techcrunch agrees as well…
facebook friends, trust relationships, implicit trust, robert scoble, buzzmachine, student privacy, prank calls, death threats, scraper, news today, scrape, thief, cornell, hack, phone number, fr, and scripts