I've never used facebook, but Section 9.2.6 of their terms says You will delete all data you received from Facebook if we disable your application or ask you to do so.
I don't see how that could be encoded in robots.txt.
Disallow: /directory/people/*
Disallow: /directory/pages/*
Done. Google crawls Facebook. Every social media monitoring company crawls Facebook (and every other social network). Tons of other companies do the same every day. I know this because many of these companies are our customers.
What really irks me is that Pete collected valuable data and whoever he shared it with was probably able to derive added value from that data - in ways that Facebook is not doing. Facebook is prohibiting value creation.
Facebook doesn't give a tinker's damn about prohibiting your value creation.
Either facebook wants to allow people to crawl it, or they don't. robots.txt should be binary - yes or no.
Statement #2 is a false dichotomy.
The Terms for facebook is a terrible document. It is written to be intelligible to humans but is full of ambiguity and undefined terms. Any lawsuit about the theory "robots.txt did not forbid my actions; therefore they are legal" would probably disintegrate into how the Terms language is interpreted.
Their lawyers probably leapt from high windows when it was released.
For a start though, you could easily state that facebook freely allow access to data, without requiring you to read terms&conditions.
You could argue that by freely allowing access to all of their data, without requiring you to read and agree to the terms of usage, then their claims have no basis.
If they did want to restrict access, or make sure every crawler had first agreed to T&C, it wouldn't take long for them to add that.
It hasn't been tested in court, and there's a truly excellent chance Facebook would lose - either in terms of the court or in terms of what's left of their privacy reputation - but that doesn't matter one little bit. They have attorneys and money, and that's all that matters in this instance.
Really. The facile assumption that "it's possible to aggregate thus it's OK to aggregate" is exactly the way normal people think (by which I mean, tongue-in-cheek, us), but corporate attorneys see all this in terms of power relationships and contracts. As far as they're concerned, the poster took pictures through their front windows, and they're damn well going to threaten him with kneecapping until he gives them his negatives.
Check out this site (just found it via search): http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/