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"I'm sorry to say that I won't be releasing the Facebook data I'd hoped to share with the research community. In fact I've destroyed my own copies of the information, under threat of a lawsuit from Facebook.
"As you can imagine I'm not very happy about this, especially since nobody ever alleged that my data gathering was outside the rules the web has operated by since crawlers existed. I followed their robots.txt directions, and was even helped by microformatting in the public profile pages. Literally hundreds of commercial search engines have followed the same path and have the same data. You can even pull identical information from Google's cache if you don't want to hit Facebook's servers. So why am I destroying the data? This area has never been litigated and I don't have enough money to be a test case."
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"A researcher who collected data from more than 210 million public Facebook profiles and used it to create a rich picture of connections among users of the social network has deleted the entire database after being threatened with a lawsuit by the company. Pete Warden, who says he had expressions of interest from more than 50 scientists who wanted to use the information in their research, writes in a blog post that he was asked by the company to destroy it because he didn’t ask the site’s permission to harvest it — and that since he doesn’t have the funds to contest a lawsuit, he complied."
