[Air-L] Facebook data goes public

[Stefania Muca]

Michael and Jacob, you have a point. But I meant good news for researchers not users. The ethics is debatable, indeed.
Sharon, I don't think this has anything to do with how Facebook looks now, it just means making this public and official.

Message: 12
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:39:47 -0800
From: live <human.factor.one at gmail.com>
To: Michael Zimmer <zimmerm at uwm.edu>
Cc: AIR Aoir <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Facebook data goes public
Message-ID: <DDCBBBDD-69C8-4C91-8D6E-0D97D9A700D1 at gmail.com>
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I'm pretty sure this is not build recently - so, hence, not in  
reaction to Facebook's change in architecture.
I think perhaps Facebook made the change because of people like Warden  
who were spidering the public profiles; just like people spidered the  
web for content years ago.

-Sharon

On Feb 9, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Michael Zimmer wrote:

> I tend to agree with Jacob. I haven't had the chance to fully  
> process/ponder this case (teaching today), but it seems that using  
> an exploit based on Facebook's recent change in architecture -- when  
> not all users have fully understood the consequences of said change  
> -- to harvest profile information is extremely problematic from a  
> research ethics pov.
>
> I'll blog about this later, and hope to start a conversation at http://www.internetresearchethics.org 
>  as well.
>
> -michael.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Michael Zimmer, PhD
> Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
> Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
> University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
> e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
> w: www.michaelzimmer.org
>
>
> On Feb 9, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Jacob Kramer-Duffield wrote:
>
>> I will respectfully disagree about the goodness of this news.
>>
>> " Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names,  
>> locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists."
>>
>> Did he ask permission? I know these are "public" profiles - or were  
>> when indexed, anyways - but being an individual and having a public  
>> profile is a different thing than being aggregated as part of a  
>> massive data set.
>>
>> This is an issue of power. Zuckerberg can talk about the end of  
>> privacy because his privilege guarantees that there won't be  
>> negative consequences to his publicity (and this would be true even  
>> if he weren't CEO of Facebook). A clever coder can talk about the  
>> "sneaky" ways you can use your friends' e-mails and Mechanical Turk  
>> to mass-harvest profiles from Facebook.
>>
>> But that doesn't speak to the ethical responsibilities that we have  
>> as academic researchers. I don't think that the way that Facebook  
>> handles its' users data is responsible, and I don't think that  
>> figuring out ways to exploit that handling is responsible, either.
>>
>> Jacob
>>
>> On 2/9/10 9:14 AM, Stefania Muca wrote:
>>> Hello, I just wanted to share the good news :)
>>>
>>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_user_data_analysis.php