Scoble Kicked Off Facebook For Downloading Content
The Facebook account of Robert Scoble has been disabled, after the prominent tech blogger tried to download his contacts from the social network, a move that is shining a spotlight on data portability in the Web 2.0 world.
In a blog post on Thursday, Scoble said that he was running a script to move content from his Facebook profile to other places, an action that is not allowed under Facebook’s terms of service.
In the post, Scoble confirmed that he was using a script from an unnamed company to move his content. An e-mail from Facebook’s customer service team that Scoble posted on his blog said it had determined that Scoble was “viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script.”
The note asked Scoble to confirm that he would not “scrape” content from Facebook or attempt to take it in any other way.
Mike Butcher, a blogger with TechCrunch UK, predicted that the portability of data on social networks will be a big issue in 2008.
The disabling of Scoble’s Facebook account “will fire the starting gun on all the debates about who owns your data on a social network, debates which — till now — have seemed rather theoretical,” Butcher said. He suggested that such actions “could even lead to a revolt amongst some Facebook users. The storm that is brewing will not take long to reach Facebook’s most senior people.”
A Facebook group that formed to protest Scoble being kicked off the social network already had more than 100 members by Thursday morning.
Scoble also noted that the Facebook action prompted him to join a group at DataPortability.org that is working to create standards that will allow users of social networks to port their own content to multiple locations.
In a blog post, Chris Saad, co-founder and CEO of Faraday Media and an organizer of the data portability group, said he welcomed the debate.
“We own our own social graph data — and we also own all our other data,” he wrote in a blog. “We all know this is just the latest in a long line of problems that are emerging in 2008 and beyond — so it’s great to have the Scobleizer championing the cause for all the standards groups out there. Now with Robert and other great bloggers on our side helping to spread the word … we have a real chance of helping each of the standards communities get the level of adoption they deserve by putting this all in end-to-end context.”
Heather Havenstein is a writer for Computerworld.com
Compliments of Computerworld.com
Reader Comments.
Surely service providers like FaceBook have the right to say “Your data is stored freely on our servers and our terms of service only allow for reasonable access of your data, and we view multiple data requests due to screen scraping unreasonable”. Hosting all those millions of records isn’t free after all.
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