Facebook’s Restrictions on User Data Cast a Long Shadow

On one hand, it is a shame to see potentially informative research (such as the drug user study mentioned) stymied, on the other hand I can't help but be pleased with this development. The amount of information Facebook holds on every one of us makes me uncomfortable, and the idea that much of that was available over APIs for anyone to consume is quite concerning.

The article includes:

> hopes to salvage his project by asking Facebook for access to eight types of data, including photos in which a user is tagged. He hopes to reconstruct a person’s friend network by seeing who they socialize with through their photos. Dr. Crosier says he won’t be able to see the images themselves, just that a user was tagged and by whom.

I don't particularly want random researchers to know who I socialise with. If this researcher (who may or may not be well intentioned) can reconstruct my friendship network, so can anyone.

It's scary enough that Facebook has this information - it's even scarier that anyone with some Python skills and a basic understanding of APIs can get it too. I'm not often wont to praise Facebook, but I think in this case they are (reluctantly and finally) doing the right thing by restricting data access.

You can derive a number of these things - hometown, education, religious & political affiliation, and relationship status - with just a couple dozen lines of code from someone's Likes, which is more innocuous anyway:

http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil

But in all seriousness, this is the logical progression. As long as all of those things are locked down, the likelihood of exporting your data to a rival platform - if there was one - is basically nil. Their goal was to become the center of gravity that pulls everyone in and now they're protecting that.

I believe the idea that users want to download their own copy of "their data" is a fallacy. Sure, the people here think in those terms but average users don't. Remember, these are the same people a generation ago would have though AOL was the Internet. They don't think in terms of "my data" and don't see the value of it.

I can grant an application permission to access my data on Facebook. I can't let an application get info about my friends though, that's their information and they control access through their own Facebook account. Otherwise, any single one of your friends authorizing an application would result in that application getting all your data. Obviously Facebook needs to err on the side of caution here, but hopefully there will be some new more restricted APIs in the future.

Oh, and as an added bonus they block all competition from accessing their incredibly valuable social graph, securing their monopoly for the future.

One way to get around the paywall is to send a message to yourself on facebook with the URL, then click on it.

On the other hand, they were giving away too much of their users private data.

Paywall.