[Air-L] Help with Facebook Research

Alex Halavais alex at halavais.net
Wed Oct 3 13:12:35 PDT 2007


I have always been curious about the TOS on this. If I set up a group
of people to click and record each page, I'm in the clear. So, what if
it's a bookmark file they are clicking from? What if the outbound
links are automatically filtered and collated? What if my browser is
pre-fetching pages? I guess the question is: at what point does it
become automated.

It seems to me that there should be a kind of Turing Test for scraping
and crawling: if you can't tell from the server side that it's not a
human, then it should be considered a human.

I know, that's not a practical proposal, but I just *wish* that was
how it was handled.

Alex


On 10/3/07, Fred Stutzman <fred at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
> Dear Cathy,
>
> Following up on Nicole's observations, I've encountered similar policies.
> After some Facebook research was released last month FB Privacy Counsel
> Chris Kelly followed up with me and stated: "Such sharing (or the scraping
> of data by researchers) is not allowable under our current policy."  Sorry
> about this.
>
> -Fred
>
>

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