Even though Robert Scoble has been readmitted to the walled garden of Facebook and forgiven for his scraping, Facebook commits the same offense against other sites.
The social networking site Facebook has a feature that permits its members to pull in contact information from web-based email systems at Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail. The feature helps people discover if those contacts already have a profile on Facebook.
However, Gmail's Terms of Use seems to prohibit this:
You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. Facebook can also import contacts from Yahoo and Hotmail. Yahoo TOS says:
You agree not to access the Service by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Yahoo! for use in accessing the Service. And Hotmail TOS says:
In using the service, you may not:
...
Use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or "meta-searching")
All three services should be banning Facebook's scripts, judging by those terms of service. Scoble's actions, through the use of an alpha version of a new
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