Facebook Crawler Speaks Back

Last week we ran a story about Facebook suing to get a crawled dataset offline. This week we have a bit of a response written by Pete Warden, the guy who actually did the crawling. He followed robots.txt, and then Facebook's lawyers went after him. It's actually a quite interesting little tale and worth your time.

Ballsy.

[Pojut]

Stupid, but ballsy. Gotta give credit where it's due.

His startup "Mailana" is "Anal I Am" in reverse

[tomhudson]

FTFA:

I'm a software engineer, my last job was at Apple but for the last two years I've been working on my own startup called Mailana. The name comes from 'Mail Analysis', and my goal has been to use the data sitting around in all our inboxes to help us in our day-to-day lives.

All Facebook is doing is nailing has "anal".

Re:Arachnophobia

[mfh]

Google sells our information by what we like. They do it in a way that somewhat protects our privacy and it's part of their service. Gmail targets adds directly to you based on keywords in your emails. If you had enough money you could know what people are talking about by how the adds played out. Therefore there is no real privacy on Google email, and Google reads our emails.

Google collects all kinds of websites and offers search. They build stats and sell off residual information based on information collected. This is why they have so many PHDs there, so they can understand what everything means on the internet to capitalize on it. Okay they say they are not evil, but that doesn't mean they don't sell the info to people who are fucking evil. In fact most of the people who deal with Google daily for business transactions (ad sense, ad words.. .etc) would eat babies, given the chance.

Re:Pretty naive

[Shakrai]

I'll just go to Congress and explain to them that they should pass a law that will be universally opposed by the corporations that give them millions in campaign contributions every year

You do realize that corporations can't (legally) contribute to campaigns in the United States, right?

Privacy ...

[zuperduperman]

So, Mark, you say Facebook have a reasonable expectation for privacy of its data? Isn't privacy passe now? Or did I hear you wrong?

Re:Mark Zuckerberg

[ichthyoboy]

If he is the face of the next generation entrepreneurs, then Bugs Bunny save the industry.

Happy now?