Facebook disabled my account
If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet).
I run this stuff so you don’t have to. :-)
UPDATE: Rodney Rumford, who runs the FaceReviews Blog about Facebook says that all traces of me have been already removed from Facebook too.
UPDATE2: Tonight I learned about DataPortability.org and signed my name to that effort.
I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service. Here’s the email I received:
+++++
Hello,
Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.
As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.
We reserve the right to take any appropriate action in connection with any activities that violate our Terms of Use and/or applicable laws, including termination of your account and pursuit of legal remedies.
Please reply to this email.
Thank you,
Facebook Customer Support
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:42 am
Not having you, is their lost.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:42 am
@Robert : you’ve been disabled, not terminated, which is the good news. Seriously speaking, IMHO here Facebook is just preventing data theft (you’ve got an automated message from a robot).
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 am
Robert - what company/script were you running? I hope they are donating their work to the GraphSync project?
http://www.graphsync.com
I hope you will join us to lobby for DataPortability.org
Think of it as OpenSocial - except no one owns it and it’s more than just widgets.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:45 am
Yes this is one of the reasons FB annoys me, it is MY social graph, my time and energy, I want to export it.
We have all scraped for years on various platforms, so FB is not “new” in getting heavy, they obviously want to keep us all in.
Trouble is walled gradens typically get emulated at some point in an open environment, it’s inevitable, I’m sure they must realise that.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:47 am
Chris Saad: I’ll reveal all soon but I’m under NDA for the tool I was using.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 am
That’s the fun of working with new technology and pushing the edge someone always has to be the first to get their fingers wrapped. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 am
Hope they get you back on. It’s a hard one this, deciding who owns the data. Technically your friends own their data, but on the other hand they’ve trusted you to have it. The only reason Facebook don’t have an export function is probably a competition/lock-in thing. Maybe they’re also worried about denial-of-service as a result of people running scripts?
Heck, even Gmail has an open API for getting contacts from it (though it’s not working on Twitter at the moment :( ).
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:56 am
[...] Ha! We knew that old rascal Robert Scoble was up to something. Apparently he used his uberleet hacking skillz and ran an automated script on Facebook, which is against their TOS. Therefore, Facebook has disabled his account. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 am
@NeilBarnwell - It’s not hard at all, *you* own your own social graph. It’s not so much the people or even data about them that makes it special its the relationship between them thats special, and again, yours.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 am
Ashley: not if you’re on Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 am
MyMacisdoingstrangethingsinsomecommentboxes.Sorryaboutthat.
Justread43foldersandthearticleaboutlettinggoofsomeofyourSocialMedia.
Maybethearticlewastryingtotellusbothsomething.
Again,sorryaboutthelackofindentationbetweenworlds.
MorrieJohnston.Sydney,NSW,Australia
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:04 am
You’ve got a track record now Robert. First it was Second Life, now this. Is there any company whose terms of service you won’t break? :-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 am
Roo: no. That’s part of my job to see how good their terms of service are, and how well enforced they are. Also, to point out when terms of service suck. In Facebook’s case its competitors don’t have the same stupid TOS and let you take your social graph with you wherever you want. In fact, its competitors don’t have a lame technical limitation which limits me to 5,000 friends either. But that’s another topic.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 am
[...] disabled after he ran an unnamed script over it, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, but he Twittered that will be taking the normal customer service route rather [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:16 am
Sounds like a bit of feedback to the developers of the software to insert some timing delay’s into the loop.
I would personally recommend loops with a minimum delay of 45 seconds, loosely ranging up to 5 min then a few longer delays along the lines of 1, 2, 8 and 12 hours.The longer delays should be fairly infrequent, but would give a better approximation of an active user, vs. a script.
Yes it will take longer to run than a quick script that scrapes 100 pages or so, but it still should run through 4999 relationships in about a week
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:22 am
Chris Saad: I will definitely lobby for DataPortability.org.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:22 am
[...] so much a walled garden as a high security prison with barbed wire and electric fences. Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:27 am
This is the classic Web 2.0 conundrum: users give their information for free to a service, which then monetizes that information, keeping all of the money for itself.
In its benign form, this works because the service that the users get has more value than the information they give. However, the malignant form of this - and Facebook is not the only culprit - then attempts to lock users in to the service by making it impossible to take the information elsewhere.
The point is that services such as Facebook have to recognise that they don’t own the information which makes their service valuable.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:28 am
[...] He was being totally cool about how it happened. I am sworn to secrecy by Robert about exactly what he was doing. Let’s just say Robert is the kind of guy that likes to push the envelope and break down [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:28 am
So what ?
Facebook sucks anyway.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:29 am
[...] just can make this stuff up, from Robert Scoble’s blog: If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:30 am
Ian: speaking of which. Facebook used my face in a Saturn/General Motors advertisement and didn’t pay me. So I don’t feel too guilty. Here’s a picture of that: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daviddalka/2106024610/
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:30 am
i bet this has something to do with jan 16 :-P
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 am
Allen: nope, actually just a coincidence.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 am
[...] Facebook hat den amerikanischen Top Blogger Robert Scoble von der eigenen Site verbannt. Anscheinend hat Robert ein Script auf seinem Account ausgeführt, das den Facebookern nicht so [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 am
[...] ίδιος περιγράφει το όλο συμβάν στο blog του και μάλλον θα μετακομίσει (αν [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 am
cool. a tool that can automatically cause facebook admins to remove all traces of you would sell like hotcakes. Where do i sign up?
now if only i could erase my digital footprint from google as well. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 am
This is interesting for sure Robert. Poof! You have never existed on facebook. You are missing from groups, top friends,etc… still looking to see if all your wall posts disappeared as well.
Screenshot of top friends and a blank of where you used to be. ;) Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
http://facereviews.com/2008/01/03/facebook-bots-disable-robert-scoble/
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:43 am
[...] Source: Scobleizer [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:43 am
you say that Robert but I am watching you right now on Qik, Skype and Ustream live so I know what’s up.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:44 am
[...] Scoble ran an unnamed script over his account, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, and although he Twittered that will be taking the normal customer service route [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 am
Allen: well, let’s meet on the 16th. The two things aren’t connected. Or, maybe they should be? Hmmm, I gotta get some sleep.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 am
Welcome to the dataportability.org team Robert :) Here’s a welcome post and summary of where we are now…
http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability/browse_thread/thread/70a3484cd44622d3
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 am
im just fooling with ya :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 am
Wow, you really are coming to the end of an era. Changes all around…
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:00 am
you should be on cnn as amit portrayed you..
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:02 am
At least you got a mail with “Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook”
I was banned in December and *still* am not sure for what. No scripts, nothing unusual…other than being participatory in the system that they created (I used their email, invited people, wrote on walls, etc.) They didnt even give my photos, videos, or contact information back - some of my business contacts were made and maintained on facebook so I have no way to recover them. I complained and they simply replied that the ban was permanent.
I was one of their biggest fans…now I’ve joined the growing chorus of detractors. Their own hubris will be what brings them down.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:04 am
Tony: that sucks. Did you blog about that anywhere? You should have.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:16 am
Data freedom is a must one. Facbook, If you don’t allow export/import, I don’t know how long you can trap user data…
I could remember Mr.Eric Schmidt was saying … “let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us”
Thanks
saran
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 am
[...] 3, 2008 · No Comments Jag har just läst vad som händer om man försöker ta med sig sin sociala graf ut ut Facebook. Man förlorar, med hänsyn till [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 am
Robert:
As a new reader/viewer/fan, I think you need to broadcast yourself live, via your cell phone at Qik, 24/7 through this whole thing. We’ll send pizzas or whatever you need since your phone will be tied up. It’ll be fun. Of course you can order pizza via the web. Papa John’s is good at this. And do some fun tours, perhaps of the Harvard dorm where Zuckerberg got things started. And walk up to people in public and ask them to be your friend. Tell them you just lost 4,999. :-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 am
Jeff: that’d be funny. Maybe in the morning depending on what happens when I get up.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 am
Robert, I’ve open a FB group for the re-openning of your account.
Hope they don’t disable mine ;)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19628302696
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:24 am
[...] Scobleizer announces that he’s blocked on facebook. Why? From the horse’s mouth:My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:28 am
Darn , And I thought it was just Podtech you were quitting !
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:29 am
loudmouthman: it’s the season to quit things and move to new social networks! :-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:43 am
It seems they are cool with a human being going through his own information on their site. So it appears the trick to running a script to scrape such a site is to run it with pauses so it looks like a human being.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:48 am
All very interesting. Facebook have a lot to prove in 2008. Its advertising system - you know, the one where they promised the “once every hundred years, media changes” thing - is showing signs that it might be broken from a commercial perspective.
Given that, the company has to show it has some ideas about how to take targetted advertising forward at large scale; that is with a credible path to annual revenues of $5-10B in the next two to three years (with continued rapid growth after that). And while they’re executing on their plan, they have to avoid becoming irrelevant.
From the position the company is in now, all this could be a pretty big challenge. Alienating users really isn’t the way to build confidence that they know what they’re doing…
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:51 am
Quite ridiculous if you ask me. You have given Facebook more coverage than they could have asked for.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:54 am
buzz.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:00 am
Your facebook social graph is no more “yours” than your telephone number is “yours”, etc. (Of course, that’s one of the points about social networking in the first place, isn’t it — it’s all social.) Check out Anne Wells Branscomb’s, “Who owns information” (Basic Books, 1994).
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:10 am
So I am curious as to why you even bother? I left FB after the Beacon gaffe and I don’t miss it. I think the strongest statement you can make is to just disable your account and stop talking about them entirely.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:15 am
Robert,
There’s one last remnant of you on Facebook. A while back, as a joke, I started a “Friends of Scoble Overflow” group for people who could not Friend you because of the 5K limit. If it can be of any use to you in your hour of banishment, I place it at your disposal.
Mickeleh
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:19 am
Robert, I hope you really do move to another social network platform. I only looked at Facebook after you started bloging about it. You gave them free publicity and an opportunity to enhance the user’s experience with your feedback. It will be interesting to see how this saga ends.
PS I have already changed my social network from Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 am
Robert,
Shouldn’t the Facebook mat be facing the other way with you ‘leaving’ the building? ;-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:26 am
[...] but I’m not sure it will make it to TechMeme, which is quite busy today reporting Robert Scoble’s expulsion from [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:29 am
Facebook told me I had been doing something similar, and mentioned legal action against me when I questioned them - actually I had done nothing at all. Paranoid or what. Don’t give them your data.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:32 am
[...] his blog, Scoble says he has appealed against the decision. On what grounds I don’t know but quite [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:33 am
It’s virtualy impossible to care. If you dont like the T&Cs go elsewhere. Simple.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:34 am
[...] big news in from Silicon Valley this morning is that Robert Scoble has been banned/blocked/not allowed to use Facebook anymore.??Iit’s interesting how Facebook just bans/blocks people at will. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:35 am
[...] via Scobleizer [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:36 am
[...] Scoble shows us how. Sort of. Posted in Writing [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:37 am
I was banned off facebook for “high levels of activity”. wtf!!
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:38 am
I’m coining a new term: Scobled
As in “you’ve been scobled dude”: terminated, waxed, disabled, vaporized, eliminated, banned abruptly and without warning.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:41 am
[...] Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook and is joining the dataportability.org project. It seems that he was running a script, which is forbidden, aimed at sucking back all his social [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:45 am
@Neil Barnwell: If I’m memory serves me right then in the early days of Facebook a facility was built into Facebook to allow the exporting of your friends’ contact information. This was subsequently removed.
I find this to be a bit annoying because I am one of the many users who rarely, if ever, adds someone that I don’t know in person. Having people maintain their own contact information for sync’ing with Outlook and subsequently my cell phone is a killer feature. Unfortunately we aren’t allowed to do that.
In a recent Slashdot story, I voiced contempt for Facebook’s meaningless notification messages and suggested finding workarounds using open-source tools to add the missing functionality. The comment was moderated to the top. Either Facebook’s employees have been reading Slashdot or other users have complained about this issue because (coincidentally) the text of both wall messages and private messages is now emailed out. Maybe Outlook sync’ing will be the next hurdle they conquer after reading this?
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:46 am
[...] Robert Scoble has been banned from Facebook for running a script that would allow him to access all his personal information which is strictly against their Terms of Use. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 am
[...] Я уже почти собралась рассказать здесь о том, что Facebook заблокировал аккаунт популярного видео-блоггера Роберта Скобля за то, что [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:51 am
But what of the people who join Facebook BECAUSE it’s such a walled garden? Yes, we all have some issue with Beacon - but the reason we have an issue with the Beacons of the world is because we fundementally DON’T want someone wholeheartedly using our graphs.
Especially not a friend, who we trust to not do that.
So while I agree with some fundamental arguments people are making here, we can’t rail against Beacon with one side of the mouth and then support someone using a script to lift my social graph for outside use without me knowing.
I guess what I’m asking is: do we really want a walled garden or not?
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:55 am
Although I’ve read (and blogged) about FB’s TOS, I still think that we own our words until we sell them (like writing for a company that pays you for your work). As the exchange on FB is having a free platform to connect and post but not actual payment for your words, I’m not sure there’s true equity there. But that’s just my opinion.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:57 am
db: what about info you’ve made public? Like, your name? And other stuff that’s on your public profile on Facebook? Are you saying that no one has the right to use that?
How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book?
Or, how about your birthday?
So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can’t take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I’m using?
How about something that actually ads value, like something that’d see that you’re on both Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and could mash those three together?
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:57 am
[...] Published January 3, 2008 Web Robert Scoble, Facebook minister-without-portfolio, is abandoning Facebook after his account was suspended for some amateurish data scraping attempts. I say “amateurish” only because he [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:04 am
[...] this case, as Scoble wrote in a blog post today, the fight with Facebook is over an effort he has been making with DataPortability.org, which notes [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:12 am
I’m getting more then a bit tired of people who willingly and knowingly enter a walled garden and then complain about the walls when they run into them.
You would think that more then a decade after the Internet defeated the walled gardens of AOL, Compuserve e.a. people should know better.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:16 am
[...] Der bekannte US-Blogger Robert Scoble wurde bei Facebook rausgeworfen bzw. deaktiviert, weil er mit einem Skript rumgespielt hat. Er macht das Ganze natürlich schön publik. Mal schauen, wie die Geschichte weitergeht. Dazu mehr: Facebook disabled my account [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am
[...] er getan hat, will er erst mit nach einem Gespräch mit dem Autor des Scripts bekannt geben, jedoch schreibt er in seinem Blog: I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am
Netvibes Ginger, perhaps? Heard they’ve got a TOS-breaking import tool…
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 am
[...] a nasty example: Robert Scoble has just had his Facebook account disabled for running a script to try to scrape his personal information off the site (since Facebook [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 am
[...] to survive CES, Scoble gets kicked off Facebook for trying to port the data out, VoIP working on iPod Touch and an addon mic for [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:25 am
…or DataPortability. That works too :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:25 am
What was the information your application was after? You’re asking people to ‘give an opinion’ on this, I’m assuming you are, but you’re not saying what kind of information you were scraping.
The TOS covers some areas where we wouldn’t want an application to scrape the contents, including others’ message, contact info, and so on. That’s what creates a thing called ’spam’.
Either you’re accessing your own information, which we assume you have already. Or you’re accessing information about other people, and they have a right to know this information is being ported outside of this application. Did you ask all your 5000+ friends if your interaction with them, and their info can be pulled from Facebook and placed into some other app?
As for 5000+ friends — you must have a been a lonely kid, that you have to have so many ‘friends’.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:27 am
[...] hat, ist auch Facebook nicht gefeit. Heute wurde der Facebook-Account von Uber-Tech-Blogger Robert Scoble gebannt. Er hatte mit einem Script versucht seinen Social Graph zu exportieren. Das verstößt [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:30 am
Shelley: do I have to ask your permission to copy down an email from Facebook and write it into my little addressbook? Really? Wow.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:31 am
You did violate the ToS (which is bad) but you had to in order to get at your graph which facebook won’t share (which is worse.) I hope the debate catches fire, thanks for leading the way.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:38 am
Robert, this is wonderful. You have become a human sacrifice for data portability and exposed something everyone has been talking AROUND. Your friends Marc Canter and Dave Winer will probably love and embrace you for this.
I have been annoyed by Facebook many times, and could care less what happens with it (I will just move to another, better social network). But when you have already established friends, and groups, that’s such a pain in the ass that I’d rather they changed their TOS.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:42 am
Scroble:
It depends on what you mean by public, if I share that data with my friends only on Facebook they absolutely should not have the right to republish it, use it for their personal use, sure.
Its a privacy thing, it’d be like me giving you my phone number and you publishing it in a directory without my permission, not okay.
It all depends on what you’re scraping the data for, and what you’re using it for. Transportation to another system, sure, public use, nope.
You can take it with you, but you can’t publish it, give it to a third party on another system? Arguably no(by that I mean make my phone number visible to everyone else on another system, not use a program that stores data you have collected similar to a gmail contact list or the sort).
I gave you and Facebook my information, I didn’t you, however, permission to republish my data, only to use it personally.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
[...] gets banned from facebook 03Jan08 Uber-blogger Robert Scoble has had his Facebook account disabled. Normally, this wouldn’t cause much of a stir but in this case Facebook will inevitably get [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Robert -
They no not what they do - or do they? :-)You out Twittered everyone!
Your a top draw and they need to show their might for now but not for long. Keep pushing the envelope.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Sorry Robert but i think you deserve it. If you broke any law or policy of Facebook you should be treated equal to others.
That is just my opinion.
But i am sorry for loosing your account, I guess you can switch to myspace now or http://www.ilovetoargue.com :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:56 am
this is crap - you can give facebook your gmail username and password and they suck up your contact list. They are not playing fair and this will hurt them.
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:57 am
[...] he was doing something that breached the site’s terms of use — specifically, he was running a script that accessed the social network and “scraped” data from it. As a result, he got a [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 am
Hey Robert,
Thanks for posting a rebuttal to my blog post “Sorry Scoble: You don’t own your friends.” I’ve now rebutted your rebuttal. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:03 am
I heard Robert was running a script to auto-add people to his band’s friend list. Err…. :P
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 am
Here is an facebook app that can save your info
http://apps.facebook.com/friendcsv/
The friendCSV app allows you to export your friends list and relevant data levels to a CSV doc that can be opened in Excel or any spreadsheet. Select the data levels below that you would like to include in your export.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:08 am
[...] Hear what Robert Scoble has to say [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:08 am
hamilton: I tried that app. It doesn’t work with 5,000 friends. Very few of the apps do cause the developers don’t test them with people’s accounts with thousands of members.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
The more I read, the happier I am. http://norman.walsh.name/2007/11/27/facebook
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:11 am
[...] 3, 2008 Today’s the net is abuzz with Robert Scobles recent block from facebook after he tried to pull down the data of his friends/colleagues into the [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Well of course they’re not going to let you run an automated process to strip out their data - that’s their value add.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:19 am
Persona non grata or you could say they stole your face!
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:19 am
“Shelley: do I have to ask your permission to copy down an email from Facebook and write it into my little addressbook? Really? Wow”
If you’re running an application that will then turn around and send me offers for Viagra. How is Facebook to know friend from foe?
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
boy they really don’t seem to want you to automate anything i guess.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
sorry rob ,, I only have a 100 friends
good luck in your fight ,,,
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
and you were one of them ,, alas
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 am
Shelley: I don’t treat my friends like that. Facebook already knows who my friends are. I was using my account to get access. I have that many friends because I don’t mistreat them.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
“Shelley: I don’t treat my friends like that. Facebook already knows who my friends are. I was using my account to get access. I have that many friends because I don’t mistreat them.”
I repeat: how is Facebook to know friend from foe?
You have that many friends because you don’t mistreat them? Robert, you probably don’t even know more than a few hundred people’s names. You’re using Facebook like an aggregator, not a true social network.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:31 am
@Robert,
You’re now listing things presumably you were using the script to gather, but my point is that I don’t know how innocent the information is that you want. You ask about my name– I have some friends who are artists who use pseudonyms and they are not searchable in Facebook, so yes- they actually do covet their names. Birthdays? Certainly you know the issues with credit card fraud and complete birthdays.
I’m sure you have a very reasonable and innocent, possibly even practical and helpful, reason for wanting whatever info you want. But some people rely on their privacy and don’t want their data ported. I’m not one of them, at least not about all my info, but it seems to me we need to be careful about the straw man of, “but I could just do this…” - That’s the same argument employers used when they’d hire student interns of a particular college to scope out potential employees when Facebook was college only. You certainly could just write down things on paper and build your own. That doesn’t mean your friends would have given you good-faith permission to do so.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:31 am
[...] TechCrunch får vi veta att välkände bloggaren Robert Scoble blivit utkastad från Facebook. Det är som om han aldrig funnits i Facebook-världen. Kommentarer, bilder och annat han lagt ut [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:32 am
Robert,
Did you try exporting your social graph into FOAF (http://foaf-project.org)
with that exporter: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mrowe/foafgenerator.html
Then, you can parse it and query it as any RDF data, or even merge it with other networks also described using FOAF (eg, from flickr: http://apassant.net/blog/2007/12/18/rdf-export-of-flickr-profiles-with-foaf-and-sioc/
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am
[...] Facebook has disabled Robert Scoble’s account for violating the terms of service. Supposedly he was running a script that Facebook didn’t like. So he’s been removed from Facebook altogether. He’s appealing, but this has got me thinking. Is Facebook the walled garden where I want all my social graph data? Fortunately my graph is nothing like the size of Scoble’s so it would be much easier to move to another service, however, if Scoble’s account is re-enabled, it’s one more reason to find a friendlier service. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:38 am
There is an inconsistency here. While you seem willing to violate Terms of Service for online applications (this Facebook violation and a prior violation with Second Life), others seem willing to trust you with Non-disclosure Agreements. If you are on “auto-accept” when it comes to terms and conditions, why should anyone trust you?
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:40 am
You’re in good company. Last month, an account I created for “Dummies Man” was pulled - I blogged about it on my site:
http://trueconfessions.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/the-return-of-dummies-man-to-facebook-and-the-beginning-of-my-identity-crisis/
I’m not sure how I was pulled for “impersonating” someone, while Fake Steve Jobs continues to exist there, but at least Scobelizer is a real person…at least we think you are!
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 am
fp: they shouldn’t trust me. But breaking contracts has very real consequences. I had hundreds of hours of work in my Facebook account. That’s a very real amount of money/time gone and a distribution channel gone for me.
If I break an NDA I’ll ruin relationships, etc and possibly end up in court. Both of which cost me time/money/opportunity.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:43 am
There is a silver lining. Now users know how to get their Facebook profile deleted. A pal of mine was trying to close his Facebook account, and he was told that it is not possible. They own the data. He told me there is no apparent way to kill your account and have all data removed. So now we know: Just run a script and get banned. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:46 am
@Robert -
You still have those hundreds of hours there, they are just in limbo as you are “disabled” - sort of like having a fan page unpublished. They can flick the switch and you’d be back on.
And some would argue that breaking social contracts has consequences too- just not always legal ones. This whole discussion may be as much a wake up call to only friend closer-to-the-vest “friends” and for people to stop friending relative internet personalities who accept everyone. Maybe this is a MySpace moment when it dawns on some that every one of their 1,000 close personal friends are neither and that because of unknown intention, a pruning begins.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:50 am
[...] Scoble reports that Facebook has kicked him off their site, citing that it appears he was running a script. In [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 am
[...] or unintentionally, celebrity blogger Robert Scoble has put himself right at the center of the data portability issue, and at the same time is helping to expose the fascicle nature of Facebook’s claims of [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 am
[...] ce qu’a essayé de faire Scoble en lançant un script pour récupérer ses données dans [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 am
I keep hoping that one of these bad moves by Facebook will be the beginning of the end. FB is like AOL all over again. Tear down the wall. Let my people go.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:58 am
wow, so many comments so fast! This is starting to become a frequent thing from facebook…
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 am
[...] raccoglie un ottimo commento riguardo la chiusura dell’account di Facebook di Robert Scoble. E non ha tutti i torti a citare e mettere nel calderone anche Twitter [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:05 am
[...] ran an unnamed script over his account, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, and although he Twittered that will be taking the normal customer service route [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:05 am
[...] ran an unnamed script over his account, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, and although he Twittered that will be taking the normal customer service route [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
@Logical Extremes
If only it was a prison, but many ran into the keep because they wanted the walls.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:12 am
[...] lost his Face…. Facebook disabled my accountOur systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:17 am
[...] “I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service.”, from his post. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 am
[...] a classic example of what NOT to do, Facebook (or some automated robot) has disabled uber-blogger Robert Scoble’s account - apparently because he’s running a script that scrapes information from his Facebook contacts [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 am
[...] Tagged “WordPress”, blogs, Customer Service, GoDaddy So- some time during the after midnight hours, the WP databases (??) at Godaddy went rouge. I can not access any of my blogs on Godaddy that run Word Press. And the biggest story to hit * Robert Scoble being taken off Facebook for trying to download his own contacts * is roaring through … [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:31 am
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was recently quoted in Wired saying, “It’s simple. The individual owns the data.”
Case in point, LinkedIn lets you download all your contacts in one fell swoop.
Disclosure: I work for LinkedIn.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 am
@13: “That’s part of my job to see how good their terms of service are, and how well enforced they are.”
That’s news to me. I thought you made videos - as opposed to try to break usage agreements that you willingly signed up to.
Any other parts of your job description we don’t know about? Or do you just make it up when it suits?
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
[...] remix data using open standards. Scoble has been publicly testing the portability of Facebook data (Facebook disabled my account, Unintended advantages, and What I was using…) in the past day and (of course) found the [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:43 am
[...] Facebook disabled blogger Robert Scoble’s account after he ran automated scripts against the site. The site’s Terms of Service say that you agree not to “use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site.” [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:50 am
Plaxo lets you sync your contact data to your local system, plus it has a really cool ‘newsfeed’-like tool called Pulse which (for contacts who enable it - it’s opt-in) shows when they’ve posted a blog post or Flickr pic or Del.icio.us link or whatever. It’s way better than Facebook’s ‘newsfeed’ which is pretty much all useless info. And you choose what you share with your contacts, and you can filter it by designating which groups of contacts see what info and so on. It’s pretty sweet.
Yes yes, I know Plaxo used to be evil and spammy. Not so much anymore, and the Pulse thing is really not to be missed. (And no, I don’t work for Plaxo.)
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:50 am
[...] my recommendations to companies deploying social ads within the article. On a related thread, Robert Scoble has scraped many of this contacts using an automated script causing Facebook to remove his account and banning him, issues over data [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
[...] the blogosphere hates you there is nothing you can do right. Robert Scoble was tooling around on facebook with a bot and got banned. And some how this is facebook’s [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 am
[...] his blog, Scoble mentioned he was using a unidentified software to transfer his social graph or contacts to [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 am
Robert,
Taking one of your comments a step farther, would it violate their terms of service for you to outsource the same functionality you were trying to automate to a service provider in India or somewhere similar to do it manually? It would be an interesting face-off (pun intended) as they try to lock down your info and you manually - and I hope LOUDLY - work your way around it.
If they let you do it manually and they let a weak version exist - the CSV app - they not letting a power user implement a power tool is just silly.
r.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
[...] nui lene a scris despre noutatea cea mare de azi. De ce să nu fiu şi eu în rând cu lumea. Scoble a fost data afară de pe [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
[...] platform: “I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places.” Facebook responded by disabling his account, because he was “viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Corporations need to realize that negative comments about them are now easily retrievable by consumers and others, including competitors. Using Facebook as an example, the Jon Swift story helped to ensure that I will never join Facebook (”Ontario Emperor” is not my birth name, so Facebook obviously doesn’t want me). While there’s obviously conversation regarding whether your actions were right or not, Facebook obviously didn’t need this type of publicity.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 am
[...] Scoble, he of the 5,000 friends and can’t sign up any more, has been blocked from Facebook for trying to download his social graph. Apparently he ran a script provided to him by Plaxo that [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:17 am
[...] was testing this service with blogger Robert Scoble, and he just got banned from Facebook because of [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
Scoble kicked out from Facebook
Blogging celebrity Robert Scoble has been kicked out from Facebook today.Using his own words “I could call people idiots for not understanding the meaning of the” Facebook terms of use, that disallow …
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Facebook kind of shot themselves in the foot with this didn’t they!
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 am
[...] Scoble, the famous tech blogger had his Facebook account disabled after trying to extract information about his friends through running a script over his [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:38 am
[...] Scoble has set a fire under Facebook for not letting him move his data out of their network and into another network. He has posted about it here. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:39 am
Robert,
How do I get myself banned too? That would make my life a lot simpler.
Guy
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:44 am
Facebook is irrelevant. I’ve never gotten the whole thing. I much prefer Linkedin Network as a professional connection tool and information gathering mechanism. It really is a great site.
Eric
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:45 am
Your facebook social graph is no more “yours” than your telephone number is “yours”, etc.
Phone numbers, unlike Facebook social graphs, are actually portable.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:48 am
[...] Yesterday in my Quick Thoughts post I made a joking reference to Robert Scoble and how we would need one of his foot in mouth type rants to make it through the boring week of post holiday news doldrums. Never did I think that he would take a cranky old fart’s suggestion and run with it; but apparently he has done just that. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
And Web 2.0 proponents want us to trust companies with our data???????
No thanks.
I’ll use Office at home and keep my data on my home PC.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Just think about how much time they just freed up for you!!! ;)
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
[...] daily that some news about his bungling comes over the blagoblag. The latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] appears Scoble has joined the ranks of Joiner and Swift as one of the famous to get banned from Facebook today. Per his blog, Scoble was using an [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] Robert Scoble has been locked out of Facebook after running a Plaxo sync script yesterday. Although it will be interesting to watch this story [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] floating around the blogosphere. I’m taking about the latest storm in a teacup, namely Robert Scoble being banned from Facebook for breaking the Terms of Service. So let me state this before [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:02 am
Be still my heart ! I stated a few months ago give a kid 200 million dollars he shall soil his diapers ! I also stated Facebook in the end will go the way of the EDSEL! I Face book generates ad revenue by increasing the amount of participants on the site ! Screwing with the Scobies of the world is adding the final paint job to the Edsel!
Facebook is a kid’s game run by kids, they are not seasoned professionals ! I enter most of my data on Stumble Upon,Mahalo,
Lijit.Ma.nolia,Mixx.Connotea, Reddit, Technorati,et al Honestly I only used Facebook to pimp posts on my blog by others ! I don’t see any content on f-book worth lifting ! Facebook and their Legal Eagles just may have them sleeping outside !
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
Well Robert, this is the reason I argued about openness in facebook platform in your early days of facebook evangelism (during one of your ustream sessions). I do know that you have come a long way from there and you are in support of open standards. I sincerely hope that you use your clout among your followers to educate them about open standards in all areas of technology and how openness is the only way to empower the users and avoid Microsoft kinda monopoly.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am
[...] someone is bothering you today, like Facebook disabling Robert Scoble’s account, give them this look… the evil [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Really, Facebook lost their best evangelist with this move. Their loss.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
[...] (Sidenote with relevance to current events: this extension is now a hop, skip, and a jump away from being able to be used to parse and download all of your friends’ information, including e-mail addresses. If Scoble had only waited, he could have avoided this whole mess.) [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
[...] mal wieder sehen, dass diese geschlossenen Systeme doch eine schlechte Idee sind. So wurde heute Robert Scoble von Facebook geworfen, da er anscheinend versucht hat, seine Daten zu exportieren um sie auf anderen Netzwerken weiter zu [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 am
[...] the journalists and bloggers who’ve been testing out the service. Robert Scoble was banned yesterday from Facebook for running the script. He received an email from Facebook that said [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 am
[...] The "hot" news this morning is that Facebook deleted Scoble’s profile on Facebook: If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet). Source: Facebook disabled my account « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 am
[...] like Robert Scoble’s most recent fight with Facebook over data portability that led to his account being disabled but don’t like how he went about starting [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 am
Join my Facebook group if you don’t need to join a Facebook group to tell the world how you really feel.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9589725852
Scoble - isn’t Plaxo evil? I still get emails from people who ‘added’ me five years ago. IT NEVER STOPS. I’d rather join Spock…
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:27 am
This is outrageous. You were instrumental in helping me get my Facebook account back, which I will never forget. Facebook seems to have hired a Bizarro World publicist who is advising them to do everything possible to get bad publicity for the company, a unique strategy indeed. I have invited my friends to join Mr. Nouÿrit’s group to get your account back and I hope everyone who reads this will join it: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19628302696