I need to fetch details about businesses, services, etc., from Facebook in order to visualize them on a geographical map.
I have read the policy published by Facebook (https://developers.facebook.com/policy) but I did not understand whether the restrictions apply to businesses etc., or only to the accounts of people (terms only mention "users").
Can anybody help me? In particular, do you think that, in order to fetch data about, e.g., a restaurant, I need its consent?
Indeed, is it legal show them on a geographical map?
Related
I've tested the Google Books API now with servers in a few different countries (Germany, UK, Netherlands; it should be in Europe) and realized that the results depend heavily on the request's origin region. For some German books (I search by ISBN) I get 20 or 30 results using the German server but nothing on the others and vice versa.
Is there any way to access the complete database Google has to offer? Note that I'm not trying to access anything like text excerpts or other critical content in terms of licensing. I only need the general information like Title, Authors, ISBN, ...
Thanks for your help!
I have the same problem. I found a paragraph in the documentation under "Using the API" (for Google books) that might explain it:
"Setting User Location:
Google Books respects copyright, contract, and other legal restrictions associated with the end user's location. As a result, some users might not be able to access book content from certain countries. For example, certain books are "previewable" only in the United States; we omit such preview links for users in other countries. Therefore, the API results are restricted based on your server or client application's IP address."
My workaround is to search while using a VPN - that returned the titles in English like I wanted to. If there's another way to solve it I'd gladly hear that too.
Users will be able to submit places through my site, providing title, description, address and other info. Info will be later used in mobile app and elsewhere.
Anyway, I was thinking to use autocomplete, powered by google places api. Am I allowed to store the full addres user types in, or selects from autocomplete list?
It is user provided information, the api is used to suggest and display on map, which is on the right from the form. The only thing I need is the full address.
Thanks for your answers.
Probably. Google's Terms of Service are a little vague in this respect, but what they appear to be prohibiting is bulk copying of their database. In your case you're using Places to assist the user. Of course it's impossible to say how Google will choose to change or interpret their TOS in the future, but you should be on safe ground.
Also see: Google Places API mass download?
Can I use the Facebook API to get which users belong to Facebook's groups for schools product? And is this a reliable way of verifying if someone is a student or not?
Is this a reliable way of verifying if someone is a student or not?
No.
I present you with a simple counter-example. Facebook's Groups for Schools uses .edu email addresses for validation. I've not been a student for about twenty years. I still have an active .edu account. Silly university!
Additionally, many educational institutions (US secondary and pre-secondary schools, I'm thinking of) don't offer email addresses.
Now, if you're looking for a rough measure, it may be good enough.
I am running a photo contest on my facebook page via a third party app (shortstack).
The grand prize is supposed to be given to the person with maximum number of Votes.
Each vote is mapped to a facebook ID, which is available to me via shortstack. The problem is that there are too many votes from fake profiles, I inferred this by manually looking at number of friends of the facebook profiles of people who had been voting (I have their facebook Ids).
I am also aware that I can extract out only the publicly shared information of these users via the opengraph.
In short, how should I go about marking all the votes in two categories "Genuine" and "Fake", after subjecting all the IDs to a certain logic that uses information out of the publicly shared user info for that Id?
As an example, let us assume number of friends a particular profile is the only metric that would be used to identify if a profile is fake or not. Now there would be that magical benchmark (number of friends) above which a profile can be considered genuine and below which all the profiles can be considered fake, although there could be some fake people above this benchmark and some genuine fellas below it. In our case, these metrics would also consist of other information a user shares via the opengraph, values and patterns of these parameters being different for genuine and fake users. The point is that I am sure that eliminating fake profiles is very common problem faced by people conducting contests,as they would like to choose the winner on basis of contestant's ability to spread the brand to genuine users. So, there must be people out there who have invested their time inthis, and it would be awesome to get some know-how on this.
I want to find out how many app users I have from a specific country. I know insights will show me how many users I have in each of my top twenty countries, but does anyone know how to find out your total number of app users from a country that is not in your application's top twenty?
Your options are basically:
Check the user's current IP with something like GeoIP
... I did some testing with GeoIP in the past, but the results didn't really convince me
Implement analytics code (I'm currently using Google Analytics)
If, and only IF this information is absolutely critical then you should look into the "user_location" and "user_hometown" permissions.
PS: Remember to update your Privacy Policy if you are going to do anything with the user's IP