Social networking and data scraping

2009-11-11

Data scraping is often carried out so that the party taking the information can make use of it for its own purposes. It appears this is now happening in the social networking world.

As seen in the recent case between Power.com and social networking site Facebook, this can end up being taken to court.

Earlier this year, Facebook sued Power for scraping data off of its website. After this, Power attempted to countersue Facebook for not allowing it to use this information. The latter case has now been thrown out by the judge presiding over it, according to reports.

TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington recently voiced his own concerns about data scraping and social networking sites when he sat on a panel hosted by TIME today, as part of its TIME 100 Roundable series, BayNewser reported.

"The companies out there gathering data on the stuff we do on Twitter, publicly scraping the stuff on Facebook, it's amazing how much data [they're collecting]," Mr Arrington commented. He noted that there are firms whose business is based on gathering as much information as possible from such websites.

Whether being screen scraped or not, there is clearly much data on social networking sites that companies can make use of.

Indeed, Andrew Girdwood, head of search for internet marketing specialists bigmouthmedia, said that advertisers should make the most of social data when planning a display ad campaign on a social network site.

"You can get it right if you use all that social data available [on social networks]. In most cases that data isn't part of the display advert platform, so it is down to the skill of your agency to research the social network and take advantage of all the tools they provide," Mr Girdwood commented.

Whether this will lead to any screen scraping of data from social networking sites remains to be seen, but how do the people on these websites feel about the commercial aspects of the websites?

A recent Webtrends consumer survey found that more than half of people who use Twitter every day expect brands to use social media to understand customers, perhaps indicating that they are happy for companies to use the available information on such sites. Despite this, half of those polled revealed they would leave a social networking site if it became too commercial.

Perhaps changes to how much control people have over their information will appease their concerns. Back in August, Facebook announced plans to improve people's control over their information and allow them to make more informed choices about their privacy.

The improvements included technical alterations designed to give people greater transparency and control over the data they provide to third-party applications.

Elliot Schrage, vice-president of global communications and public policy at Facebook, commented: "We believe that these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the commissioners' outstanding concerns, but they also set a new standard for the industry."

Even though the site is making changes to improve people's control over data, there is plenty of concern around the security of social networking sites at the minute. This has been highlighted by recent news that a major coding error on social networking websites MySpace and Facebook had been identified.

Dutch Facebook application developer Yvo Schaap found flaws in both sites that could have potentially led to unauthorised access of users' data. These have now been fixed, according to reports.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, claimed that the potential damage that could have been done because of such weaknesses was "enormous".

"A malicious hacker could have exploited this vulnerability to gather information about users and potentially collect data which would have helped them steal identities," he commented.

Facebook itself recently noted the importance of online security on its blog, as the organisation asked Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), to share his thoughts on what people should be doing on the internet to keep themselves safe.

One of his tips was to make use of privacy, safety and other settings on social networks, while understanding threats and learning more from the NCSA website as well as the Facebook Security Page can help as well.

In the future, perhaps social networking sites will increasingly have to deal with screen scraping activities, what with the numerous issues over privacy and data that have arisen recently. Time will inevitably tell.