They said they'll use it to support their 'personal analytics' programme [0], which is free via wolframalpha.com - I don't see how this data would help with Mathematica or anything else they charge for?

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/

Wolfram must have have built something people want, are willing to pay for, and even like ?

Even though WA is closed source and for-profit, I few them (and the company) as a kind of fellow scientist and not the evil big corporation (like oracle, microsoft etc.).

It all depends who ask for my data.

It is data already on Facebook, so why are you so picky with sharing it further? (Or rather - criticizing people who do so.)

Especially, as one can get some nice plots back (also - personal).

People donated their data so that a blog post like this could be written. Mission accomplished, I guess.

It's taking advantage of non-public Facebook data, which is closed anyway. So, your data is now being used by two places instead of one. More open.

i was thinking the same thing ..