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EFF: Facebook Tries to Make User Use of Aggregating Services Into Criminal Trespassing Violations

By Andis Kaulins

At EFF Seeks to Protect Innovation for Social Network Users: Facebook Tries to Make Violations of Terms of Use Into Criminal Violations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes:

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal judge to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites.

"California's computer crime law is aimed at penalizing computer trespassers," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "Users who choose to give their usernames and passwords to aggregators like Power Ventures are not trespassing. Under Facebook's theory, millions of Californians who disregard or don't read terms of service on the websites they visit could face criminal liability. Also, any Internet company could use this argument as a hammer to prevent its users from easily leaving the service as well as to shut down innovators and competitors."

 See:
 Claire Cain Miller, Bits, New York Times, Facebook Is No Friend of Power.com
 ... and
Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Facebook v. Power Ventures and Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization

Essentially, Facebook wants to deny users the ability to use aggregating services to connect to Facebook and to force every user to connect to Facebook only in the manner that Facebook dictates. Pure tyranny.

The more we learn about Facebook, the less we like what we see. Facebook apparently thinks it is permitted to do anything it wants while it attempts to keep its competition from doing anything that might reduce Facebook power. We predict that this philosophy will down the road end in severe legal sanctions against Facebook, who is otherwise trying to run roughshod over user privacy. Suing power.com for trespassing while at the the same time engaging in its own -- what we regard to be criminal -- privacy invasion of its users data has got to take the cake.

Full post as published by LawPundit on May 06, 2010 (boomark / email).