"Edit: A Quartz article from 2014, in which the service is described as “spammy”."
Yeah, seems pretty sleazy. "I didn't get as rich as I wanted, so I'm going to release all this information about people who never wanted their information to be distributed this way, and I'm going to release it in a way that is uncontrollable."
Claydon writes: "I could have sold this data to some data broker for a lot of money and it would have been used by those with money for marketing or political purposes rather than freely available for the public good. Instead I donated it for free to the Internet Archive."
How is it any worse than what the Internet Archive does normally when it scrapes sites itself? Most sites aren't able to stop scrapers the way FB could.
Internet Archive would be sleazy if it started out by selling data before becoming what it is now? I don't see that the history of the company matters.
tbh I'm not crazy about some of the things the Internet Archive does, either.
What bugs me about Profile Engine is that there are probably a lot of people who realized their mistake of leaving their profiles wide open on Facebook, and tightened up the restrictions, whose details might still be wide open in this dataset without them even realizing.
Yeah, seems pretty sleazy. "I didn't get as rich as I wanted, so I'm going to release all this information about people who never wanted their information to be distributed this way, and I'm going to release it in a way that is uncontrollable."
Claydon writes: "I could have sold this data to some data broker for a lot of money and it would have been used by those with money for marketing or political purposes rather than freely available for the public good. Instead I donated it for free to the Internet Archive."
He's either naive or stupid.