from Hacker News

The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive

by randomdrake on 3/31/18, 10:33 PM with 53 comments

  • by danso on 3/31/18, 11:33 PM

    According to the creator’s Patreon:

    https://www.patreon.com/profileengine

    > I spent ten years on a project to build a free, public, highly advanced search engine for social network data. I obtained special permission from Facebook to index 420 million public profiles. When Facebook reneged on the deal and tried to destroy my business, I spent years of my life and a lot of money on legal costs and eventually obtained a settlement. I have continued to operate Profile engine for several years despite it not making money because it stands between Facebook and a monopoly over social data and because it helps educate people not to trust Facebook.

    It seems like his main motive is to ruin Facebook — ostensibly by making it obvious to the world the dangers of FB data. And he’s doing this by releasing the accessible data — including photos — of every user who set their profile public.

    The PR harm to Facebook is obvious. I’m not so sure the millions of people naive enough to not tighten their privacy settings will be completely understanding. Even if there is no legal danger, this doesn’t seem well thought out in terms of consequences.

    Edit: A Quartz article from 2014, in which the service is described as “spammy”.

    https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-faceboo...

  • by wpietri on 3/31/18, 11:26 PM

    Very interesting. For those curious, this covers the period where Facebook grew from ~50m to ~500m monthly users (depending on what months are included). Some selected events from Facebook's history in this era:

    2007/01 m.facebook.com launched 2007/05 Facebook Platform launched 2007/11 Facebook removes "is" from status updates 2008/06 Facebook settled with the Winklevii 2008/11 Facebook Credits launched 2009/02 The like button is added [1] 2009/09 Facebook announces they are cash flow positive 2009/09 Facebook launches @-tagging friends 2010/06 Comments now have like buttons 2010/10 Fincher's movie The Social Network is released

    [1] I honestly had forgotten that this wasn't always part of Facebook, but it's apparently true: https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/facebook-activates-like-bu...

  • by jumelles on 3/31/18, 10:46 PM

    > We sued Facebook, fought hard in a David and Goliath battle and won a good settlement. One day, maybe we'll have time to tell the whole story - you'd be utterly shocked what goes on inside Facebook - what you've already heard is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Well that's a very interesting statement....

  • by danso on 3/31/18, 11:53 PM

    FWIW I haven’t seen any sign of collaboration by Internet Archive, on their site nor on their Twitter. Anyone can upload what they want to IA — it’s no indication of IA endorsement or of copyright status.

    Edit: sorry if I was unclear. Anyone can create an account and create their own file archives. If you poke around enough you can find old movies and books that are still under copyright. I assume IA has to follow DMCA

  • by underwater on 4/1/18, 2:10 AM

    A for profit company makes a copy of user data, fights Facebook’s requests to delete that data, tries to monetise it, and then then that fails (possibly because of incoming privacy legislation) freely distributes it as a data dump.

    Who is the bad guy here?

  • by nenadst on 4/1/18, 8:17 AM

    from the Readme :

    <quote> "... We have donated the complete Profile Engine database to the Internet Archive with the current exclusion of the following sensitive fields:

    Email address Facebook user ID number Facebook username Surname Profile Engine login password hash ... " </quote>

    and this : <quote> "... What if this data is abused?

    This data has already been publicly available, first from Facebook and then on many search engines (including Profile Engine) for up to 10 years, with the consent of the person who entered their information on Facebook. Anyone who wanted to misuse this information has probably already had access to it and already saved what they want ... " </quote>

    so the main reason is that he probably realized that there is no way to make money with this as anybody who wanted to (mis)use the data already had their own copy of it.

  • by teddyh on 4/7/18, 3:00 PM

    Since at least today, the items have been removed from both the linked page and from archive.org; “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content.”.

    Fortunately, nothing vanishes permanently in today’s web, since we have this wonderful thing called archive.org… oh, wait…

  • by mrtksn on 3/31/18, 11:17 PM

    Okay, I was made aware of this website a few days ago and it was possible to search Facebook users by many criteria as location, gender, age and IQ.

    So If I'm getting this right, now we are all can have the data that Cambridge Analytica was supposed to delete, right?

  • by mynewtb on 3/31/18, 11:10 PM

    First time I hear of this. Wow, what an interesting release!