
The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive - randomdrake
http://profileengine.com/groups/profile/433187197/fek-duan
======
danso
According to the creator’s Patreon:

[https://www.patreon.com/profileengine](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...](https://qz.com/279940/meet-profile-engine-the-spammy-facebook-
crawler-hated-by-people-who-want-to-be-forgotten/)

~~~
zeth___
I expect him to be sued to oblivion when the GDPR comes into effect. This is
all of irresponsible dangerous and illegal.

~~~
rhizome
Does ProfileEngine have a local instance in the EU or something? Are you
thinking the "G" in GDPR means "global?"

~~~
Buge
Would it be possible for the EU to get an arrest warrant and extradite the
creator to the EU?

Or if an extradition isn't possible, what if the creator goes on vacation to
the EU, would the creator get arrested then?

~~~
jakeogh
No. Unless he goes to the EU he is not subject to the laws of another country.

~~~
Buge
Then how was Roman Seleznev arrested and charged under US laws even though he
never visited the US, or even a country with an extradition treaty with the
US?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Seleznev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Seleznev)

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Because small, weak countries like Maldives will kidnap and send anyone,
anywhere if the country asking for the kidnapping victim is wealthy and/or
powerful enough. A much more withering indictment could be made against New
Zealand for their attempted extradition of Kim Dotcom to the USA.

~~~
jakeogh
Exactly. People tend to counter with "well the US did it". That's your
countries fault people, I'm sorry, and as a US citizen I work on these things,
but please stop blaming us for your weak governments. We have our own
corruption problems, and if you think I mean the outsider who just wrecked two
political dynasties and our MSM then I politely suggest you figure out who
owns your news sources.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661704)

BTW that was Biden's OP for his pals. Creepy guy.

------
wpietri
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...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/facebook-activates-like-button-
friendfeed-tires-of-sincere-flattery/)

~~~
wpietri
And that's what happens when noprocrast interacts with the lack of preview and
time-limited editing. This is what I meant:

    
    
       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
    

Ahem.

~~~
qubex
I remember having a lot of fun writing status updates that began with ’is’
back in the day. I can’t believe the last time was more than ten years ago...

~~~
notahacker
I wonder when the "how you met" which used to generate all kinds of absurdist
responses disappeared, perhaps to encourage more friending between people that
actually had no clue how or if they'd met.

And no Facebook timeline should fail to mention when they removed the Top Gun
quotes from the bottom of the page.

------
jumelles
> 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....

~~~
danso
edit: looks like settlement was confidential: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-
Profile-Engine-and-how-can-a-p...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-Profile-
Engine-and-how-can-a-profile-be-deleted-from-there/answer/Lawson-Business-
Training)

edit: CNET article including PDF of complaint:
[https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-unfriended-us-company-
cla...](https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-unfriended-us-company-claims-in-
contract-suit/)

------
danso
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

~~~
spullara
Considering it is hosted on archive.org I'll take his word for it.

Edit: didn't realize anyone can put something at a top level download link.

~~~
greglindahl
All downloadable items on the Internet Archive have a link like that.

------
underwater
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?

~~~
greglindahl
Do we have to pick exactly one bad guy?

~~~
Ensorceled
As my Mom is wont to say “Both people in a fight can be wrong. And they
usually are.”

------
nenadst
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.

------
teddyh
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…

------
mrtksn
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?

~~~
danso
No. This is Facebook data from _public profiles_ gathered in 2007 to 2010.

CA’s data was collected via a quiz app, from users and those users’ friends,
sometime around 2013-2015.

~~~
mrtksn
Okay, any idea how this website was able to search by IQ?

~~~
danso
No idea. But IQ is not a data point in FB’s system. So likely it’s a data
field that’s part of some game/app?

~~~
mrtksn
According to this article Facebook can estimate user's IQ:
[https://www.ft.com/content/3dfa397c-9a73-11e4-8426-00144feab...](https://www.ft.com/content/3dfa397c-9a73-11e4-8426-00144feabdc0)

Do you think that this could be a FB data point as the creator of the archive
claims to have had a deal with Facebook to scrape data?

~~~
danso
I can’t read past the paywall. But you read a newspaper article in which
someone (who? A FB official? An academic?) claims FB can derive something from
user data? That’s something literally anyone can try to do. Doesn’t have to
involve FB officially.

~~~
mrtksn
Sure, but I would love to see what FB derives from their wast data and
userbase.

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

