You probably wouldn't have got in much trouble, just a c&d and probably asked to fork over some money from your profits and sign a contract with google that you

You probably wouldn't have got in much trouble, just a c&d and probably asked to fork over some money from your profits and sign a contract with google that youll never do it again (And "your" account on google disabled"). ;) At least thats what happend with me and my friend when we mined about 1/10th of users from facebook, and crowdsourced a bunch of info from people, made it public, (we had an psudeoanonmyous no login messaging feature where people would literally share informaion that would make people question what privacy is when n-1 people are divulging everything about you) from searching names. If I wasn't a US citizen, id probably do it better now that i know more of what im up against. Maybe the landscape might be more open in the US in the future. People moan on and on about facebook and companies like them as if they are all powerfull (they can seem that way if you play by their rules and submit to their jurisdiction for pragmatic reasons), but challenging those assumptions and leveraging user behaviors, and arbitraging legalities, one can probably crack some pretty big holes...