Considering that Facebook has asked for my email username and password in order to scrape the contacts from my email, this seems hypocritical. So, it's ok for Facebook to scrape data from other sites since that's data going into Facebook (per the user's wishes), but it isn't ok for other sites to scrape Facebook data (per the user's wishes).
I thought everything Zuckerberg ever built was based on scraping other peoples' data. Even now, didn't they pull info from Wikipedia for their pages about your interests?
Ok, I've never read their terms of service, until now. I'm guessing they have provided credit to the actual authors with a link to the original article and included a licensing notice? (not on Facebook)
Wikipedia's Terms of Use basically just guide you to act in a manner compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike license, as well as the earlier GFDL license. (I am not a lawyer, probably there are significant additions, that's just my take on it).
Facebook could have scraped Wikipedia without asking, but as it happens, there is an agreement in place. I happen to work at the WMF, but don't ask me for more details, I'm not that privy to them.
Interesting. The thread certainly makes it seem like it will be mutually beneficial. Maybe Facebook is a little less evil than I think, considering they gave a heads up.
5.3 ... You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.
Second, I imagine both of your examples use some for of API [2], which is clearly "the interface that is provided by Google". On the other hand, if your smartphone were to log into the GMail web-app pretending to be someone using a browser and scrape the HTML, it would, most likely, constitute a violation.
Yeah, I snipped the first line because I didn't think it applied to Facebook harvesting emails (they asked for your password). Sorry if it was misleading.
A while ago I did look into this. I can't remember what the situation was with Gmail at the time but I'm fairly sure that hotmail had a similar clause in their ToS whilst Facebook was actively enabling scraping.
