Facebook Derangement Syndrome: Don't Blame Facebook For Company Scraping Public Info

from the it's-public-info dept

Earlier this month I talked a little bit about "Facebook Derangement Syndrome" in which the company, which has real and serious issues, is getting blamed for other stuff. It's fun to take potshots at Facebook, and we can talk all we want about the actual problems Facebook has (specifically its half-hearted attempts at transparency and user control), but accusing the company of all sorts of things that are not actually a problem doesn't help. It actually makes it that much harder to fix things.

The latest case in point. Zack Whittaker, who is one of the absolute best cybersecurity reporters out there, had a story up recently on ZDNet about a data mining firm called Localblox, that was pulling all sorts of info to create profiles on people... leaking 48 million profiles by failing to secure an Amazon S3 instance (like so many such Amazon AWS leaks, this one was spotted by Chris Vickery at Upgard, who seems to spot leaks from open S3 instances on weekly basis).

There is a story here and Whittaker's coverage of it is good and thorough. But the story is in Localblox's crap security (though the company has tried to claim that most of those profiles were fake and just for testing). However, many people are using the story... to attack Facebook. Digital Trends claims that this story is "the latest nightmare for Facebook." Twitter users were out in force blaming Facebook.

But, if you look at the details, this is just Facebook Derangement Syndrome all over again. Localblox built up its data via a variety of means, but the Facebook data was apparently scraped. That is, it used its computers to scrape public information from Facebook accounts (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Zillow, elsewhere) and then combined that with other data, including voter rolls (public!) and other data brokers, to build more complete profiles. Now, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that combining all of this data can raise some privacy issues -- but, again, that's a Localblox issue if there's a real issue there, rather than a Facebook one.

And, this is clearly the kind of thing that Facebook actively tries to prevent. Remember, as we've covered, the company went on a legal crusade against another scraper company, Power.com, using the CFAA to effectively kill that company's useful service.

Here's why this kind of thing matters: if you blame Facebook for this kind of thing, then you actively encourage Facebook to go out of its way to block scraping or other efforts to free up user data. That means, it ends up giving Facebook more control over user data. Allowing scrapers of public info (again, the fact that this is public info is important) could actually limit Facebook's powers, and enable other companies to pop up and make use of the data inside Facebook to build other (competing) services. The ability to scrape Facebook would allow third parties to build tools to give users more control over their Facebook accounts.

But when we look on scraping of public info as somehow a "breach" of Facebook (which, again, is separate from the messed up nature of Localblox leaking data itself), we're pushing everyone towards a world where Facebook has more control, more dominance and less competition. And that should be the last thing that anyone (outside of Facebook) wants.

Filed Under: chris vickery, data collectors, facebook derangement syndrome, public info, scraping
Companies: facebook, localblox, upgard