When facebook started there was none of the current restrictions and bullying that we see now, the restriction have even been extended to the actual users of facebook that ironically makes up facebook itself.

When they started-off for instant you can have as many friends as possible but now users are been restricted as to the amount of friend requests they are permitted to make, which completely defeats the whole purpose of social networking.

There are two aspects to social networking – ONE is networking with actual friends you already have and TWO making new friends. There some uppity people or users who would say this new stance of facebook is right in order to protect a users privacy but how many of the many current facebook users would raise their hands and honestly say they have never sent a facebook friend request to a stranger before? And if one things about it, how can a stranger who just wants to be your friend impinge on your privacy, all you have to do is not accept the request, their is no need for facebook to put in these restriction or any restriction for that matter, let the users decide if they want to accept friend requests from friends. I think the problem facebook has with this is just the increased traffic, which cost money to them. They would prefer you click on the adverts from complete likewise strangers instead of using the site to make new friends. What some users dont realise is that in actuality facebook are the ones willfully infringing their rights, to privacy and to their personal content, be it written words or photos! They let developer use your data and content in anyway they chose and turn a blind eye because it brings in revenue!

Its all about money and the more money facebook makes the more they want and the more they want the more they will try to control users and small business entrepreneurs who tries to use data openly available to other multimillion dollar companies.

In conclusion I believe that facebook has become too big even for themselves to manage their own intentions and wimps objectively and contructively and like everything that becomes too huge or too big or too tall, it will fall eventually, fall because of its own weight!

Going back to the original points in this thread – this is just another example of the ‘big dog’ taking advantage of the ‘small dogs’, especially if the ‘big dog’ see that the ‘small dog’ is trying to threaten facebook’s current monopoly position on social networking.

Facebook should own users data simply because they provide the space to store it or upload it no more so that the providers of free parking in cities dont own your cars if you decide to use their carparks.

Controlling people never works indefinitely, social networking and attitudes towards social networks is constantly evolving and facebook should evolve with it by giving its users what they want not what they think they needd or eventually users will become turned off with facebook, like they eventually got turned off hi5 or the many other now archaic social networking sites of yesteryears!

The post never mentioned the researcher having ‘no money’, but that he doesn’t have the _required_ amount of money to be a test case. If he were to go up against a multi-billion dollar company on such a grey area like this, it could end up costing both sides millions of dollars when everything is said and done. There’s no question that Facebook has that kind of money, but it’s pretty unlikely that he does.

Anyway, how is the amount of money he has at all relevant to your comment? The amount of money someone has doesn’t define what they’re capable of. More often than not, it’s the opposite of that.

In response to the actual post:

I don’t think the guy did anything wrong. I also don’t think it’s fair that he’s being singled out. Do you really think that Yahoo, Google, Bing, AOL, HotBot, AllTheWeb or ANY of the other major search engines went to Facebook and asked for permission before indexing their site?

I highly doubt it. I don’t remember any of them asking me if they could index MY site. Even if I had the same exact agreement as Facebook does, my site would still be crawled to fetch that agreement. There’s no way that the owners of SEs manually read every single site’s agreement that they index, they simply follow robots.txt and that’s that.

There’s something very wrong here. IF all major search engines were required to fully read Facebook’s terms of service and contact Facebook to get permission, the site very likely wouldn’t have even half of the users that it does.

What is it that he did that was so wrong? The fact that he was honest about it? What if he intended to create his own search engine? I’m sure if he had the money to fund it (or the support of someone who does), he’d have a damn good chance of winning.

I do think it’s interesting that the same company who retains your data indefinitely after you’ve “deleted” your account has a problem with him keeping the data he collected.