Facebook cambia ancora regole

PeteSearch fa notare che Facebook ha imposto nuove regole ai robot che visitano le sue pagine e raccolgono informazioni. E non sono né chiare né standard. Mettono in difficoltà i piccoli e impongono ai grandi di trattare. Soprattutto non salvaguardano gli utenti ma soltanto quello che Facebook pensa di possedere perché gli utenti lo hanno prodotto e di fatto donato al social network.

E’ un’epoca in cui tutti si fanno le loro regole e gli standard di comportamento online sono messi in discussione dalle grandi piattaforme.

Dice PeteSearch:

“What it means in practice is that large established companies are able to
crawl (though always with the threat of legal action hanging over them) but
smaller, newer startups will be attacked by Facebook’s lawyers as soon as they
look threatening. Google definitely fall foul of the new rules (caching web
pages, the use of data for advertising purposes), so I’d be interested to know
if they’ve signed up? I know these changes would make it impossible for them to
get started today, since they’d have to contact each and every website before
they crawled them and respond to things like “an accounting of all uses of
data collected through Automated Data Collection within ten (10) days of your
receipt of Facebook’s request for such an accounting”. Avoiding that sort
of mess was exactly why the industry agreed on robots.txt as a standard.

To be completely clear, I understand that Facebook need to protect their
users’ privacy. This does nothing to help that, anyone malicious is free to
gather and analyze all the information they have made public about people,
Facebook has left it all completely in the open with no technical safeguards.
What this does is gives Facebook a legal stick to beat anyone legitimate who
tries to openly use the data they’ve made available in a way they decide they
don’t like.”