Legal Issues Murky When Government, Marketers Mine Data From Social Sites

The legal issues of scraping data are extremely murky -- though not necessarily for privacy reasons.

When companies allege that scraping is unlawful, they tend to argue that scraping infringes sites' copyrights, or constitutes a trespass, or violates terms of service clauses that forbid accessing the sites through automated means. Those allegations are central to a pending lawsuit about scraping by Facebook against Power.com. The latter company aggregates information from a variety of social networking sites, enabling users with accounts at services like Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter to access their information from one portal. To do so, Power asks users to provide log-in information for their social networking sites and then imports their information. Facebook objects to the practice, arguing that Power is violating a federal computer fraud law by scraping.

It's not clear whether courts would enforce this provision against, say, a company that's monitoring the site in order to gather intelligence about job applicants. As a practical matter, however, it's probably impossible to prevent people from manually collecting information that users have themselves made available in a public forum.