My apologies for not posting this sooner — after all, by now, the whole internet has had something to say about the Robert Scoble vs Facebook incident.

For those of you that are still in the dark, here’s the story in short: prominent blogger Robert Scoble used a script from Plaxo to scrape the names, birth dates, and email addresses of his Facebook contacts so that he could import them into Plaxo. His Facebook account was immediately disabled for violation of the terms of service, and after much debate in online and mainstream media, Facebook reinstated his account 24 hours later.

The fact that Scoble violated Facebook’s Terms of Service is inarguable, and for that, he deserved to have his account disabled. What Scoble did do, however, is expose the ludicrousness of the TOS itself. I’ve written a lot about the problem with Facebook’s closed nature before, but Scoble himself sums it up quite nicely:

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

This is why projects like the movement for standardized data portability are so important. If they existed, Scoble and Facebook wouldn’t have had this falling out in the first place. (Check out DataPortability.org if you’re looking for more information on this front.)

It’s also clear that the only reason that Scoble was reinstated in less than 24 hours was because of his relative web celebrity status. I know of many people who have had their accounts deactivated (seemingly without reason) who are still waiting to receive a reply from Facebook two months after the original appeal. Is this just a case of Facebook saving PR face?

But I’m not here to comment on the power of web celebrity; instead, I want to comment on some of the thoughts by people on the web that Scoble was essentially “stealing” their data.

What a lot of people forget to realize is that they gave their data to Scoble in the first place by adding him as a friend. Using a script to scrape your name, birth date, and email address is no different than Scoble sitting there and doing it by hand — just faster. If you’ve already given him permission to have access to that data, why is it all of a sudden stealing when he uses a script to access that data instead of typing it out himself?

Again, Robert Scoble is not an identity thief, because he is not stealing anything that wasn’t already given to him in the first place. He simply automated the process. Sure, I don’t agree with him populating all those contact details into Plaxo, but as someone who granted him permission to my data, he has the right to scrape it whenever and however he wants.

And on a final note: Scoble, can you send me that script? I need a way to import my 1,500 contacts into my desktop address book!