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(Unverified)Jan 3rd 2008 1:41PM

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If Facebook doesn't allow you to collect your own data, then how come their APIs allow you to do exactly that? It doesn't seem like you could tell the difference between someone legitimately using the APIs under the terms of the EULA or whether someone is *gasp* trying to use their data somewhere else.

That little term in the Facebook EULA, 'Thou shall not use automated means to scrape thine own data,' seems to not allow the use of any of those applications that so many of Facebook's users love to pollute their pages with. Even if the difference is discerning whether the data was collected via the API or a web browser, all you have to do is parse the web page output to spoof collection from a browser. That's not too terribly hard either...

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