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by James Robertson.
Original Post: In Facebook's Defense
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Dare notes that the law is not on Scoble's side here, and - as I said earlier - Facebook has good reasons for banning scraper bots:
So if Facebook allows you to extract information about your Facebook friends via their APIs, why would Robert Scoble need to run a screen scraping script? The fact is that the information returned by the Facebook API about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Thus if you are trying to “grow virally” by spamming the Facebook friend list of one of your new users about the benefits of your brand new Web 2.0 site then you have to screen scrape Facebook. However there is the additional wrinkle that unlike address books in Web email applications Robert Scoble did not enter any of this contact information about his friends . With this in mind, it is hard for Robert Scoble to argue that the data is “his” to extract from Facebook. Secondly, since Robert’s script was screen scraping it means that it had to hit the site five thousand times (once for each of his contacts) to fetch all of Robert’s friends personally idenitifiable information (PII). Given that eBay won a court injunction against Bidder’s Edge for running 100,000 queries a day, it isn’t hard to imagine that the kind of screen scraping script that Robert is using would be considered malicious even by a court of law.
I still think there's a PR problem, given the size of Scoble's megaphone. He's not necessarily on the side of truth and justice here, though.