Freeing the Scoble 5000

Twitter and the blogosphere are up in arms after Facebook disabled uber-blogger Robert Scoble's account for data scraping. Scoble was working to move his social-graph - all the data, friends (of which Scoble has close to 5000) etc. - to other sites. Facebook disabled his account accompanied by an email informing him that his actions constituted a violation of their Terms of Service. The cause of such fuss is that the information he was attempting to scrape is his own; his account has been disabled for the crime of accessing his own information.

The whole debacle has raised debate about issues of data privacy, ownership and portability. Scoble posted the email he recieved on his blog, and it appears to be nothing more than a standard violation notice.

Hello,

Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

Scoble openly admits to using an automated script in an attempt to free his social graph; clearly this is a violation of the TOS. Despite this, support for Scoble has been strong, with many people outraged that his account has been disabled. This indicates that people are dissatisfied with Facebook's current position on data privacy and ownership. They can't afford another scandal akin to the launch of Beacon. Unfortunately, they could have found no better way to turn the entire blogosphere against them than by banning Robert Scoble, and I don't think this will end well for them.