According to TechCrunch, it looks like Plaxo Pulse was responsible for Robert Scoble’s recent banning from Facebook. Plaxo Pulse is a feature that allows users to match up Facebook contacts with Pulse contacts. This is done by way of a script which is essentially screen scraping. Facebook doesn’t allow email addresses to be exporting using the API and displays them on screen as images, so Plaxo developed OCR software to read the addresses. Meanwhile, they did all of this without consulting with Facebook. Way to go Plaxo!
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Facebook, Google and Plaxo Join the DataPortability Workgroup - Betaflow
January 8th, 2008 at 11:09 am
1[…] Plaxo was busted by Facebook for scraping user data, it looks as though everyone is going to start playing nicely together. Today, Facebook, Google and […]
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