[Air-L] Help with Facebook Research

[E.W.]

Are you doing this to identify participants?  Could an easier option be to
distribute a campus wide emailing offering the survey to facebook users?

-Ellie

On 10/3/07, elw at stderr.org <elw at stderr.org> wrote:
>
>
> > I am planning a survey of Facebook members at NJIT, where I am a PhD
> > student. I would like to write a web crawl or similar program to
> > identify through Facebook who is part of the NJIT network. I have seen
> > other papers discuss this technique, but I need more specific details as
> > to how to accomplish it. Any ideas?
>
>
> The basic sketch of the technique is this:
>
> 1) identify a starting point [initial URL]
> 2a) programmatically collect all linked pages (in effect, use a regex that
>     matches "a href=")...
> 2b) ...that match criteria you specify
> 3) recurse
>
> however....
>
> Web crawls of Facebook are against the Terms of Service of the site.  You
> might be able to work something out using the Facebook API, rather than by
> crawling.  It will take some work.
>
> Your campus IRB will be highly unlikely to approve a project that
> explicitly violates the site's TOS; the TOS exists to give both Facebook
> and the other users of the site some notion of what sort of privacy
> exposure they are likely to be surrendering.
>
> --elijah
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