The Profile Engine Has Been Donated to the Internet Archive

Megalith

Megalith

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In 2007, Chris Claydon created the Profile Engine, a search engine that ultimately crawled Facebook and copied all of its public users’ profile data from 2007 to 2010. After much controversy, particularly from individuals wanting to be forgotten, the data will apparently live on indefinitely, as Claydon has decided to publicize the entire database.

You are free to download the entire Profile Engine database to create your own search engine with the historic archive of public Facebook data from the period 2007-2010. The files are huge, containing hundreds of millions of profiles with billions of group membership and friend connections. The database files total under 100GB but there are several TB of images, too.
 
I'm all for the internet archive (seriously, it's an awesome thing), but we all have a reasonable right to privacy, and I think this is overstepping that.
 
Facebook early on was the best place to find people posting pictures of their most stupid and embarrassing moments. Why anyone would do that and expect privacy is beyond me. Once it's out there you can't get it back. :rolleyes:
 
I resisted creating a facebook account until 2011 or 2012... And even then, it was only for club activity purposes. I guess I'm safe.
 
Tsumi said:
I resisted creating a facebook account until 2011 or 2012... And even then, it was only for club activity purposes. I guess I'm safe.
Click to expand...

safe from THIS archive. Facebook's archive that for sale to advertisers has much more info than this guy would've had.
 
robble said:
safe from THIS archive. Facebook's archive that for sale to advertisers has much more info than this guy would've had.
Click to expand...

Well, I haven't out any pictures onto my facebook other than random anime pictures, a few blurbs about where I work, and literally nothing in terms of posts. I hop on facebook maybe once a month to clear out notifications. They can sell that data of they want to.
 
BloodyIron said:
I'm all for the internet archive (seriously, it's an awesome thing), but we all have a reasonable right to privacy, and I think this is overstepping that.
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A right given up the moment you post on Facebook. It definitely sucks, but if you put it on Facebook, be sure you don't mind the world knowing. I thought everybody knew this. If they don't know, then they should. You are the product at Facebook.
 
I used a pseudonymn. I rarely use it, and never for contacting family or friends.
 
After a reddit post 4 days ago, profileengine's website was constantly down from people rushing to delete their profile. They brought the website back up with traffic changes, so you could only navigate to 10 pages per day. However, the limited search parameters, create account, claim, and delete process is so utterly complicated that it takes at least that many page views to delete your profile if you are at the top of the search results. Many people who were trying to delete their profile after they became aware of the website's existence, are now permanently unable to do so.
 
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