Thanks for sharing this, Christophe. (I don't see this quote within the link you provided. Where is it from?) I'm not surprised that Facebook has requested this action. But contrary to Warden's quote, I see a difference between the data being _available_ to commercial firms (which he means crawlable by search engine spiders, if I'm reading the post correctly), and having it _released en masse_ to the public in an easily digestible form. Given the threat of a lawsuit, it appears that the former is allowed by Facebook's TOS, but the latter is not. And, clearly, there is the problem of taking the information outside of its intended context once you aggregate it and release it to the public, as I previously detailed here: "Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users" http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/02/12/why-pete-warden-should-not-release-profi... Best, Michael Zimmer -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies Associate, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org On Mar 18, 2010, at 5:39 AM, Christophe Prieur wrote:
Hi there,
Remember the guy that announced a forecoming release to the research community of a huge dataset of publicly available facebook data? Remember many of you guys have disapproved of this idea for ethical reasons?
Well, no big surprise, he was asked by facebook to destroy his dataset. But this genuine experiment yields an interesting question:
<quoting Pete Warden> In an ideal world, we might not want any of this data to be public at all. At the moment it's easily available to commercial firms, but not to researchers, which seems like a bad deal all round. </quoting>
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/03/facebook-data-destructio...
_ Christophe Prieur, prieur@liafa.jussieu.fr Liafa, Université Paris-Diderot http://liafa.jussieu.fr/~prieur/ [user experience research, social networks, (large) graph algorithms]
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