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The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive
- jumelles 9y ago> We sued Facebook, fought hard in a David and Goliath battle and won a good settlement. One day, maybe we'll have time to tell the whole story - you'd be utterly shocked what goes on inside Facebook - what you've already heard is just the tip of the iceberg. Well that's a very interesting statement....
- danso 9y agoedit: looks like settlement was confidential: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Profile-Engine-and-how-can-a-profile-be-deleted-from-there/answer/Lawson-Business-Training https://www.quora.com/What-is-Profile-Engine-and-how-can-a-p... edit: CNET article including PDF of complaint: https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-unfriended-us-company-claims-in-contract-suit/ https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-unfriended-us-company-cla...
- mynewtb 9y agoFirst time I hear of this. Wow, what an interesting release!
- mrtksn 9y agoOkay, I was made aware of this website a few days ago and it was possible to search Facebook users by many criteria as location, gender, age and IQ. So If I'm getting this right, now we are all can have the data that Cambridge Analytica was supposed to delete, right?
- danso 9y agoNo. This is Facebook data from public profiles gathered in 2007 to 2010. CA’s data was collected via a quiz app, from users and those users’ friends, sometime around 2013-2015.
- mrtksn 9y agoOkay, any idea how this website was able to search by IQ?
- danso 9y agoNo idea. But IQ is not a data point in FB’s system. So likely it’s a data field that’s part of some game/app?
- mrtksn 9y agoAccording to this article Facebook can estimate user's IQ: https://www.ft.com/content/3dfa397c-9a73-11e4-8426-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/3dfa397c-9a73-11e4-8426-00144feab... Do you think that this could be a FB data point as the creator of the archive claims to have had a deal with Facebook to scrape data?
- danso 9y agoI can’t read past the paywall. But you read a newspaper article in which someone (who? A FB official? An academic?) claims FB can derive something from user data? That’s something literally anyone can try to do. Doesn’t have to involve FB officially.
- mrtksn 9y agoSure, but I would love to see what FB derives from their wast data and userbase.
- feelin_googley 9y ago"Prior to April of 2008, Plaintiffs had written the first Survey, Petition, Polling, Quizzes and IQ Test applications to appear on Facebook and ranked as one of the largest Facebook application developers in the world." Source: http://www.techfirm.com/storage/ProfileFacebookComplaint.pdf http://www.techfirm.com/storage/ProfileFacebookComplaint.pdf
- lopmotr 9y agoThis is public profiles, not friend networks. It's the data that you weren't supposed to publish if you didn't want people to see it.
- wpietri 9y agoVery interesting. For those curious, this covers the period where Facebook grew from ~50m to ~500m monthly users (depending on what months are included). Some selected events from Facebook's history in this era: 2007/01 m.facebook.com launched 2007/05 Facebook Platform launched 2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates 2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii 2008/11 Facebook Credits launched 2009/02 The like button is added [1] 2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive 2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends 2010/06 Comments now have like buttons 2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released [1] I honestly had forgotten that this wasn't always part of Facebook, but it's apparently true: https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/facebook-activates-like-button-friendfeed-tires-of-sincere-flattery/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/facebook-activates-like-bu...
- wpietri 9y agoAnd that's what happens when noprocrast interacts with the lack of preview and time-limited editing. This is what I meant: 2007/01 m.facebook.com launched 2007/05 Facebook Platform launched 2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates 2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii 2008/11 Facebook Credits launched 2009/02 The like button is added [1] 2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive 2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends 2010/06 Comments now have like buttons 2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released Ahem.
- qubex 9y agoI remember having a lot of fun writing status updates that began with ’is’ back in the day. I can’t believe the last time was more than ten years ago...
- notahacker 9y agoI wonder when the "how you met" which used to generate all kinds of absurdist responses disappeared, perhaps to encourage more friending between people that actually had no clue how or if they'd met. And no Facebook timeline should fail to mention when they removed the Top Gun quotes from the bottom of the page.
- danso 9y agoAccording to the creator’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/profileengine https://www.patreon.com/profileengine > I spent ten years on a project to build a free, public, highly advanced search engine for social network data. I obtained special permission from Facebook to index 420 million public profiles. When Facebook reneged on the deal and tried to destroy my business, I spent years of my life and a lot of money on legal costs and eventually obtained a settlement. I have continued to operate Profile engine for several years despite it not making money because it stands between Facebook and a monopoly over social data and because it helps educate people not to trust Facebook. It seems like his main motive is to ruin Facebook — ostensibly by making it obvious to the world the dangers of FB data. And he’s doing this by releasing the accessible data — including photos — of every user who set their profile public. The PR harm to Facebook is obvious. I’m not so sure the millions of people naive enough to not tighten their privacy settings will be completely understanding. Even if there is no legal danger, this doesn’t seem well thought out in terms of consequences. Edit: A Quartz article from 2014, in which the service is described as “spammy”. https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-facebook-crawler-hated-by-people-who-want-to-be-forgotten/ https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-faceboo...
- zeth___ 9y agoI expect him to be sued to oblivion when the GDPR comes into effect. This is all of irresponsible dangerous and illegal.
- cctt23 9y agoHow is collating public profiles dangerous, or illegal? GDPR doesn’t cover it unless the poeple in question make a specific request either.
- zeth___ 9y agoIt's a bit difficult to make a request when a torrent of the data is released. And the privacy settings on facebook in 2007 were "lol what's privacy?"
- danso 9y agoFWIW I haven’t seen any sign of collaboration by Internet Archive, on their site nor on their Twitter. Anyone can upload what they want to IA — it’s no indication of IA endorsement or of copyright status. Edit: sorry if I was unclear. Anyone can create an account and create their own file archives. If you poke around enough you can find old movies and books that are still under copyright. I assume IA has to follow DMCA
- spullara 9y agoConsidering it is hosted on archive.org I'll take his word for it. Edit: didn't realize anyone can put something at a top level download link.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 9y agoAll downloadable items on the Internet Archive have a link like that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- exikyut 9y agoYes, anyone can upload anything. 1. I have seen "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content" many times while poking around. It's the Internet Archive's version of SIGSEGV or "Bad command or file name." This is due to DMCA mostly. 2. The kinds of dark items on the IA are extraordinary, for example https://archive.org/details/%77%68%61%74%63%64%63%72%61%77%6c https://archive.org/details/%77%68%61%74%63%64%63%72%61%77%6... (not NSFW; I've obfuscated the URL so it doesn't get indexed). If this makes no sense to you that's okay.
- greglindahl 9y agoI don't know why you think you've obfuscated the url, as a search engine guy I assure you that crawlers are not confused by that sort of obfuscation.
- underwater 9y agoA for profit company makes a copy of user data, fights Facebook’s requests to delete that data, tries to monetise it, and then then that fails (possibly because of incoming privacy legislation) freely distributes it as a data dump. Who is the bad guy here?
- greglindahl 9y agoDo we have to pick exactly one bad guy?
- Ensorceled 9y agoAs my Mom is wont to say “Both people in a fight can be wrong. And they usually are.”
- megamindbrian2 9y agoI hate how Miley Cyrus ruined photos by making young people think it is funny to stick your tounge out.
- nenadst 9y agofrom the Readme : <quote> "... We have donated the complete Profile Engine database to the Internet Archive with the current exclusion of the following sensitive fields: Email address Facebook user ID number Facebook username Surname Profile Engine login password hash ... " </quote> and this : <quote> "... What if this data is abused? This data has already been publicly available, first from Facebook and then on many search engines (including Profile Engine) for up to 10 years, with the consent of the person who entered their information on Facebook. Anyone who wanted to misuse this information has probably already had access to it and already saved what they want ... " </quote> so the main reason is that he probably realized that there is no way to make money with this as anybody who wanted to (mis)use the data already had their own copy of it.
- teddyh 9y agoSince at least today, the items have been removed from both the linked page and from archive.org; “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content.”. Fortunately, nothing vanishes permanently in today’s web, since we have this wonderful thing called archive.org… oh, wait…