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A couple of years ago, Pete Warden created a start-up company called Mailana (short for Mail Analysis). "My goal has been to use the data sitting around in all our inboxes to help us in our day-to-day lives."
Some time later, the focus changed.
"I'd already applied the same technology to Twitter to produce graphs showing who people talked to, and how their friends were clustered into groups. I set out to build that into a fully-fledged service, analyzing people's Twitter, Facebook and webmail communications to understand and help maintain their social networks.
"It offered features like identifying your inner circle so you could read a stream of just their updates, reminding you when you were falling out of touch with people you'd previously talked to a lot, and giving you information about people you'd just met."
On March 17th, Warden announced that due to the threat of legal action from Facebook, he had destroyed all accumulated Facebook-derived data linked to the analysis of social networks.
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Despite the ill-will over the entire incident, Warden does express some sympathy for Facebook noting that he was about to release data that they had no idea was available.
"I know from my time at Apple that reaching for the lawyers is a tempting first option when there's a nasty surprise like that. If I had to do it all over again, I'd try harder not to catch them off-guard."
Despite this setback, he observes that it isn't particularly difficult for anyone to obtain data from Google and he is already working on a similar analysis on publicly-available data linked to Google Buzz.
Getting back to the history of the saga: "I noticed Facebook were offering some other interesting information too, like which pages people were fans of and links to a few of their friends. I was curious what sort of patterns would emerge if I analyzed these relationships, so as a side project I set up fanpageanalytics.com to allow people to explore the data. I was getting more people asking about the data I was using, so before that went live I emailed Dave Morin at Facebook to give him a heads-up and check it was all kosher. We'd chatted a little previously, but I didn't get a reply, and he left the company a month later so my email probably got lost in the chaos."
Pete next describes the hell that broke loose upon him.
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Next, in a fit of boredom he took to the data with some colouring tools to highlight some of the simple patterns he'd noticed.
Within 2 days, his blog post had received something like 200,000 hits via YCombinator and Reddit.
Next his mobile phone rang with Facebook's attorney on the other end.
"He was with the head of their security team, who I knew slightly because I'd reported several security holes to Facebook over the years. The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion, but in light of my previous good relationship with their security team, they'd give me one chance to stop the process.
"They asked and received a verbal assurance from me that I wouldn't publish the data, and sent me on a letter to sign confirming that. Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission."
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"They were quite accommodating on the details, such as allowing my blog post to remain up, and initially I was hopeful that they were interested in a supervised release of the data set with privacy safeguards. Unfortunately it became clear towards the end that they wanted the whole set destroyed. That meant I had to persuade the other startups I'd shared samples with to remove their copies, but finally in mid-March I was able to sign the final agreement."
"I'm just glad that the whole process is over. I'm bummed that Facebook are taking a legal position that would cripple the web if it was adopted (how many people would Google need to hire to write letters to every single website they crawled?), and a bit frustrated that people don't understand that the data I was planning to release is already in the hands of lots of commercial marketing firms, but mostly I'm just looking forward to leaving the massive distraction of a legal threat behind and getting on with building my startup.
I really appreciate everyone's support, stay tuned for my next project!"
An analysis of these events is on the final page.
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Field's legal action against Google was regarded rather poorly by the judge: "Field decided to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in the hopes of making-money from Google's standard practice." The judgement also noted that "author granted operator implied licence to display 'cached' links to web pages containing his copyrighted works."
Although appearing to support Facebook's claims of doing all they can to protect the privacy of their subscribers, the action against Warden seems aimed more at protecting a valuable resource and revenue-stream; exactly the same motivator the company has for constantly fiddling with the privacy dashboards in the hope users won't notice the changes that make more and more data available.
Facebook should also check with the courts to ensure they haven't misunderstood the current legal standing of the robots.txt file!
