Facebook Kills Dataset of Crawled Public Profiles 158
holy_calamity writes "Internet entrepreneur Pete Warden wrote a crawler that collated the public profiles of 210 million Facebook profiles and was set to release an anonymised version to researchers. The pages crawled can be read by any web user, and the robots.txt did not forbid crawling. However, Facebook claimed he had violated its terms of service and threatened legal action. Fearing costs, Warden has now destroyed his dataset. For a snapshot of the insights that data could have allowed, see Warden's post on how the friend networks of the 120 million US users in his data segregated into seven clusters." Of course, if he had it, this means anyone who wants it made their own version of this.
Re:Very interesting (Score:3, Funny)
ahem, put 'to', of course...
Re:For an Interesting Exercise in Head Asplosion (Score:3, Funny)
Except Facebook is claiming he violated its terms of service (a contract), not the law.
To me, this claim seems to be as legitimate as a public library claiming that I read too many books and threatening to sue me.