Why is this a news story? If you invest money into a term investment fund, do you whine and complain that you get less than you bargained for if you withdraw YOUR money early? It’s not a perfect analogy but it works since in both cases there is an essential quid pro quo, here he got the use of a service for “free” in exchange for valuable consideration consisting of his data.

Ultimately, it’s their sandbox, their rules. No one forces anyone to join.

First, Robert clearly knew that he was violating the ToS, and that he was likely to get banned. In a comment on TechCrunch UK, he noted that some of his friends had done “the same thing I did so they can be totally deleted from Facebook.” Like his episode with Second Life, Robert knew he was riding the edge and likely to provoke a response.

Second, it’s perfectly true that the users own the data and should have the rights to it. I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 in general is that users provide the data while site owners make the money, and that the very least site owners should be obliged to provide is data portability (and removal, which Facebook makes very very hard).

But Scoble wasn’t scraping data he’d provided. He was scraping data which other people had provided, and which they’d allowed him access to. However, arguably, they’d only allowed him access within the context of Facebook – they hadn’t explicitly given him carte blanche to transfer that information to any other service. I provide my email and phone number to Robert via Facebook, but I don’t necessarily expect him to then take those and put them into any other service – one which might, for example, send me interminable “invites”.

What Facebook should do, of course, is give people the option: provide an API for external access, and allow users to opt in to having their data accessible through it. But without that explicit consent to have data you provide scraped, I’d err on the side of caution – and say that Scoble’s actually in the wrong.