3 ms·

Dating site creates profiles from public records

15 points by aresant 16y ago

jwatzman 16y ago
The article mentions scraping public Facebook data. Someone else did that a while ago, resulting in a change to their robots.txt (it's now a whitelist) and nearly a lawsuit. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-facebook.html http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-go...
bermanoid 16y ago
Our old friend "if it's on the Internet, it's public domain" rears its head again: "For example, if you open a Facebook account and your setting are not set to private, all of that information is in the public domain, it is free for the taking," he told iTnews.
- baddox 16y ago
  I'm not sure how the question of intellectual property protection (public domain) is relevant to factual information about yourself or another person. Intellectual property doesn't seem as applicable in this situation as does, say, privacy. Details like your religion, age, hometown, etc. wouldn't be covered by copyright, would they? Nor would they be covered by trademarks or patents or as trade secrets. Correct me if I'm wrong. As for status updates or things like favorite quotations or even favorite movie lists, I suppose I can understand them being considered original creative works which could be coverable by copyright. Of course, I'm generally against intellectual property protection as a whole, so I'm not the best judge.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    Facts are not copyrightable, but a credible profile looks more like "Hi, I'm John Doe and I live in Austin, Texas [fact]. I like foo and hate bar. I'm looking for a girl/guy to love and go on long walks with. (etc)" Such text is copyrightable.
- nodata 16y ago
  "To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it's no longer private. But that's not how privacy works, and it's not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control." -- http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-technology-security-10-privacy.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-tec...
bugsy 16y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
A1kmm 16y ago
So 98.09% of the profiles on the site are for people who didn't sign up for it and don't want to hear from site members? Meaning that from the perspective of a member of the site, if they contact someone on the site, more likely than not, they won't hear anything back. Meaning that the site is unlikely to retain very many users - and so the future present value of a potential customer will be very low. This in turn mean they can't afford to spend very much money to acquire actual users - and make the 98.08% even worse to the point where the only people to visit the site will be people trying to delete their profile and first time visitors. One possibility: maybe they aren't actually going to do it, they are just looking for free publicity. Otherwise, why would they announce it ahead of time (or if they are just trying to inflate their numbers as a 'fake it until you make it' strategy, announce it all).

15 points by aresant 16y ago

The article mentions scraping public Facebook data. Someone else did that a while ago, resulting in a change to their robots.txt (it's now a whitelist) and nearly a lawsuit. http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-got-sued-by-facebook.html http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-go...

bermanoid 16y ago

Our old friend "if it's on the Internet, it's public domain" rears its head again: "For example, if you open a Facebook account and your setting are not set to private, all of that information is in the public domain, it is free for the taking," he told iTnews.

baddox 16y ago
I'm not sure how the question of intellectual property protection (public domain) is relevant to factual information about yourself or another person. Intellectual property doesn't seem as applicable in this situation as does, say, privacy. Details like your religion, age, hometown, etc. wouldn't be covered by copyright, would they? Nor would they be covered by trademarks or patents or as trade secrets. Correct me if I'm wrong. As for status updates or things like favorite quotations or even favorite movie lists, I suppose I can understand them being considered original creative works which could be coverable by copyright. Of course, I'm generally against intellectual property protection as a whole, so I'm not the best judge.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Facts are not copyrightable, but a credible profile looks more like "Hi, I'm John Doe and I live in Austin, Texas [fact]. I like foo and hate bar. I'm looking for a girl/guy to love and go on long walks with. (etc)" Such text is copyrightable.
nodata 16y ago
"To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it's no longer private. But that's not how privacy works, and it's not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control." -- http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-technology-security-10-privacy.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/05/google-facebook-twitter-tec...

bugsy 16y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

A1kmm 16y ago

So 98.09% of the profiles on the site are for people who didn't sign up for it and don't want to hear from site members? Meaning that from the perspective of a member of the site, if they contact someone on the site, more likely than not, they won't hear anything back. Meaning that the site is unlikely to retain very many users - and so the future present value of a potential customer will be very low. This in turn mean they can't afford to spend very much money to acquire actual users - and make the 98.08% even worse to the point where the only people to visit the site will be people trying to delete their profile and first time visitors. One possibility: maybe they aren't actually going to do it, they are just looking for free publicity. Otherwise, why would they announce it ahead of time (or if they are just trying to inflate their numbers as a 'fake it until you make it' strategy, announce it all).