Facebook Scares Researcher into Deleting Public Profile Dataset
Facebook Scares Researcher into Deleting Public Profile Dataset
Posted 04/01/2010 at 6:53am
| by Paul Lilly
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Pete Warden, an entrepreneur from Boulder, Colorado, was about to share with fellow researchers the data he collected from the public profiles of some 210 million Facebook users. His records included a "social graph" showing all the friend connections between users in the dataset, and could have been a pretty powerful research tool for social scientists. So where is the data now?
Wiped out, says Warden, who claims Facebook threatened legal action if he didn't delete his data. Warden says he complied because he didn't have the funds to contest a lawsuit.
That's too bad, as more than 50 researchers had requested copies of the dataset, which Warden says he obtained by writing "crawler" software designed to harvest information from Facebook profile pages viewable without logging into the site. At the time of the alleged legal threats, Warden had already used the graph to show how the social connections of 120 million US users were concentrated in regional clusters.
Image Credit: Microsoft
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xbarnes
April 02, 2010 at 4:26am
I hope someone else picks up this line of research. Quite interesting preliminary results.
Athlonite
April 01, 2010 at 10:24pm
this should have been titled Fagbook bums scientist
rule to the internet number one: If its in the public domain your free to use it however you like as long as it doesn't cause the public or property damage
Play till it breaks then learn how to fix it!
roleki
April 01, 2010 at 11:57am
He probably scrapped it because the 'data' was just 30TB of farmville updates.
EvilHomerGD
April 01, 2010 at 9:02am
It's a shame he had to delete all that data. The graph linked to in the article and the information he relayed was kinda interesting.
Neufeldt2002
April 01, 2010 at 8:40am
Knowing facebook, they probably threatened lawsuit after the guy refused to pay for the data he harvested.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I wanted a signature, but all I got was this ________
sirphunkee
April 01, 2010 at 12:43pm
But if the data is published publicly, how can Facebook (or anybody) restrict how that data is analyzed?
That would be like the phone company telling me I can't copy down entries from the phone book and sort them in reverse alphabetical order if I so choose...
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