Is it ok for a webservice which uses F-connect to store the friend count (NOT the friends list) from Facebook (or this is counted as a breach in privacy).
As the Facebook Graph API does not allow auth_tokens to be used to get such detail of friends if they are not registered to the webservice.
I have seen people recommending storing the friend count and showing it to others.
I think I can help with this. I did some research on this topic.
Their policy states: "You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data." The anwser to the FAQ 'How long can I store data' is as follows: "We have deprecated our 24 hour data storage policy. You may now indefinitely cache data to improve your application's user experience."
For the record, I am not an attorney, so Im looking at their statement from an IT perspective. If I read their statements (which basically says you may store anything received through the API), I would say it is ok to save the friend count.
Is it ok for a webservice which uses F-connect to store the friend count
We don't give out legal advice, consult an attorney. As always free legal advice is worthless, so even if we did tell you anything if it's legal, it's not trustworthy information.
I have seen people recommending storing the friend count and showing it to others.
Facebook says this is ONLY ok if it serves a purpose for your application. Again, consult an attorney before you make any hard decisions.
Related
I need to quickly get the names of about 1000 users that I now only have the facebook id and access tokens of. I'm not comfortable with the FB api yet so I was considering just writing a scraper to retrive the name from the FB page of the user (since I have the id of the users).
Is this allowed? I assume it's not "best practice" but how severe is it? Will it get me banned for instance? The data will only be used to complete our user database so no advertisement
Alternativly: Can anyone point me in to a good (and up to date) guide of how to get user info using the FB api (keep in mind that I have the ID and the access.tokens of all my users).
No, scraping is not allowed and you MUST use the Graph API: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php
/me?fields=name&access_token=[user-access-token] returns the name of a User - You may run into API limits though, but if it´s a one time thing it should not really matter. If you run into limits, just wait a bit and get the next batch.
I know pretty well that this topic has been discussed very intensively (I read a lot all over the day).
Still, how probable is it that FB might allow me to create a frontend crawler for a non-commercial, non-public research university project?
My crawler should repeatedly lookup a very limited number of specific public fan pages and collect anonymized data like number of fans, status updates and their number of likes and number of comments each.
What I would like to show is what kind of topics in media pages are "liked" and discussed most and how that develops over time. I know about FB's restricted TOS. Thanks for your opinion on that.
The second question concerns technological approach / authorization: Reading a fan page's number of fans, status updates and their number of likes each - could I even use the API/OpenGraph for such a crawler? I think for reading page walls, you need an access token at any cost, and realizing an automatic "crawler" via an application therefore is not possible I guess (as apps only react to users' actions and cannot act like cron jobs for example)?
As you see, I am pretty new to FB development and logic. Thanks so much for your expertise.
If you mainly target public pages then you should be ok.
You need to have a facebook app and then you can authenticate as the app from your program.
You will get an app token with which you should be able to use in order to crawl public pages data.
If you check the documentation for the Page object you'll see in the tables (fields and connections) that most of what's in the Permissions column is either "No access token or user access_token" or "any valid access_token or user access_token", if you have the app token you're good.
Also, and I think this is something you'll be interested in, the Page object has the "talking_about_count" field.
So, yes you can do it, at least most of it.
As for the TOS, since all of this is perfectly ok and straight from their official documentation, there's no problem.
I created a Facebook app(game) in JavaScript. I used Facebook's php-sdk. I dint make a good use of the sdk except to display the name of the user logged, and his details.
I want to store the score of each user at some place. Checked FQL. As far as I saw, it doesnt allow you to store data, there was only SELECT query available. So is there any way in which we can append the score to user information or something similar.
In short can we store the data on Facebook
OR
We should use our own database server only to store the data.
In general you need to store your own data. While it might be possible to fake it by using some attribute of a user, it's certainly not the way it's designed to work and you can't count on the data always being available. You are better off setting up your own database and use the users' FB IDs to tie the info together.
Facebook now supports posting scores via scores api found here.
You can also publish achievements relevant to the game as in here
These have enough guidance to help you out !
Hi
I am developing a facebook app that involves the use of the user's email and ID. Storing users’ info to database is a more efficient approach for the purpose of the app. I am wondering if I am allowed to do this. I have read that facebook does not allow the storage of any kind of user's data for more than 7 days, however officially facebook website does not seem to mention this. Do you have any information about this issue?
The official policies are here. One relevant paragraph is:
"You may cache data you receive
through use of the Facebook API in
order to improve your application’s
user experience, but you should try to
keep the data up to date. This
permission does not give you any
rights to such data."
I'm a graduate student whose research is complex network. I am working on a project that involves analyzing connections between Facebook users. Is it possible to write a crawler for Facebook based on friendship information?
I looked around but couldn't find any things useful so far. It seems Facebook isn't fond of such activity. Can I rely on the Facebook API?
Update (Jan-08-2010): Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I probably need to contact Facebook directly then. Cheers
Update (Feb-16-2011): A new book, "Mining the social web", just came out. In it, there is a chapter devoted entirely for mining Facebook using Python. Cheers.
You can't rely on the Facebook API unfortunately. To get friend information, you need to use something like friends.get(). However, any Facebook API method that returns user information like this requires that you have an active session key from that user, and generally the way you get an active session key is to have the user come to your Facebook application or page.
In summary, the information you are talking about is essentially private. You can't pick a person from Facebook, get their friends, and get those friend's friends, and so on. To me this is a good thing for privacy, but of course it prevents arbitrary analysis.
I'd throw out the idea of writing a quick and dirty application with some user appeal that you could use for research. If a group like S**t My Dad Says (funny, not really safe for work) can get 120,000 users in a couple of months, you could probably plead your case with a small research application and get a reasonable amount of users.
The problem is that facebook friendship information is typically private and only accessible to friends. It should be a lot easier to build this network on Twitter, if this is an option for you.
As others have stated, this is typically private information. If, however, Facebook per se isn't a requirement, you could use Google's Social API. A snippet from the Google Social Graph API page: "With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful."
Here's an article on using it in Ruby:
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/google-social-graph-api-ruby-rails#
This lifecode post provide a basic python script to scrape your facebook friends contact info.
The output of this script, is the profile ID, profile pame, profile URL, e-mail address and mobile/phone number (if provided by friend).
WARNING: This is against Facebook TOS. Use at your own risk.
Info provided for educational and research purposes
http://ruel.me/blog/2010/11/26/scrape-your-facebook-friends-contact-info-with-python/
You can use http://www.facebook.com/directory/ to get the public listed people.