Excuse my naïveté, but what could one use this list for? Aside from spam email blast?
You could start Groupon clone right away (presuming you have the deals).
Wonder if you could just spam groupon deals with your affiliate link included?
Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
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Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#92Why is he called a Mozilla blogger? He doesn't work for Mozilla foundation or Mozilla corp as far as I can see (nor does he claim to). His linkedin states he associates with the "Mozilla community", but that's hardly an official representative of Mozilla as "Mozilla blogger" implies.
His blog is syndicated to planet.mozilla.org. It's hardly a high quality blog.
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nitpick: Cost per unit of digital goods is low , but not zero . Servers, bandwidth, CC fees, sysadmins, etc.
Not a nitpick, beacuse the cost to enter the data by the user is also not zero (thus supply is not infite either). These are subtle but not trivial things to keep in mind, when dealling with massive scale (A billion users, ect.)
Those are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a nitpick, beacuse the cost to enter the data by the user is also not zero (thus supply is not infite either). These are subtle but not trivial things to keep in mind, when dealling with massive scale (A billion users, ect.)
Those are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.
Care to explain a bit more? On the face of it, I don't believe this can make sense. All costs scale, all costs are at some stage marginal. What are you proposing is the trigger or cause of incurrence?
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What should I expect?
They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed…
Glad you found our anti-scraping stuff to be neat! I work on the team that builds a lot of that technology at Facebook. Any interest in interning here sometime and helping us improve our systems even more?
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed…
Soon we'll have very clever, slow going, open source Facebook scrapers, created for free just because we love a challenge.
You could friend people, get to know them, get their email, go to a party to meet their friends, friend them.... and eventually scrape the whole network, if you had a team working in parallel.
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#97Just curious, is this illegal? What happens if the seller didn't disclose the method in which he aggregated the data or says I just stood in a shopping mall and asked people to voluntarily disclose these details? (Sure he'll have a hard time proving that) ....
Chances are it's in the app's privacy policy that they can share your data with "carefully selected third parties" or something similar.
Not allowed by Facebook developer TOS (which they never enforce).
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a nitpick, beacuse the cost to enter the data by the user is also not zero (thus supply is not infite either). These are subtle but not trivial things to keep in mind, when dealling with massive scale (A billion users, ect.)
Those are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.
They're absolutely marginal costs, if you look at the right way.
Takes more servers and fatter pipes to support 10,000 downloads a day rather than 500.
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#99Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person. Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!
>Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand I don't think that rule applies for digital goods where the cost of reproduction is zero. The supply is infinite.
You're all looking at the supply side of things - there might also be very low amounts of demand.
Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.
They're absolutely marginal costs, if you look at the right way. Takes more servers and fatter pipes to support 10,000 downloads a day rather than 500.
For something like a list of a million user names and email addresses? You put it on pastebin and set up a script to email out links to it when you get a Paypal payment confirmed email. The only cost is to acquire the data, once that is done, there is zero cost.
If you want to talk in totally abstract terms, digital goods in general tend to have marginal costs associated with them. In the context of this discussion, there is no supply and demand factor, there are no marginal costs, and there is no market force called scarcity.