[gonzo]

Originally Posted by RawAlex

Greg, if you look at facebook profiles, many users have personal information posted, like emails and such. At one point, it wasn't hard to write a basic bot to go out and look at your friend's friends, and then their friends, and so on, basically scanning your way through the entire facebook roster over time.

However, in the last 5 or 6 months, facebooks has become much more strict about restricting access to user profiles without permission of the user. As a result, a program that use to work harvesting this information would now generate huge numbers of error messages.

If someone attempted to circumvent these blocks (by faking the request headers or otherwise spoofing the system) they would certainly be crossing the line.

I don't have any exact information on what was involved here, but I have to say that I am NOT impressed.

Scraping to spam would be my guess or to seed a personals site. It sure as hell wouldnt be the first time!