If I infer correctly, this company that Facebook just sued executed some scripts that didn't do anything an end user couldn't do manually -- just thousands of times faster than an end user would have been able to.
I see three theories here, one of which is significantly less plausible than the other two:
1. This web scraping may have violated a Terms of Use policy. Highly relevant if the links in question were available only to a registered Facebook user; irrelevant otherwise. (If I'm an anonymous web surfer, I have no particular obligation to obey any given Terms of Use of any given publicly available site.)
[1a. The web scraper might have violated the Terms of Use of whoever old that company Internet access.]
2. The web scraping may have interfered with, or degraded, other people's use of Facebook. This is what Denial of Service is about. It's a Very Bad Thing.
3. Facebook may claim that it's somehow this other company's fault that Facebook users' privacy was compromised. The basic idea here is security by tedium: There was a way to get all this user data, that nobody would bother with because it would take so long (except when someone wrote a script to make it not take so long). Here the blame is entirely with Facebook.
Posted by Matt Bruce at December 17, 2007 04:59 PM