Social Media

UnFaced Founder Banned from Facebook


UnFaced, a service that tracks visitors to your Facebook page, has received a cease and desist letter from Facebook - the founder's account has also been suspended. The action followed a profile of the service in school newspaper The Daily Texan last Monday, which seems to have brought it to the attention of Facebook staff.

Although it's hard to see why users would want yet more tracking in light on the Facebook news feed debacle, Unfaced offered an interesting service that I planned to review. You put a link on your profile which other Unfaced users can click - when they do, Unfaced delivers a compatibility score. It's broadly similar to the MySpace tracker trend, but less beneficial since Facebook doesn't allow the insertion of code. Founder John Arrow claims the site has a few thousand members, with 3400 added in the past week.

Facebook, however, weren't so keen on the idea. In a cease and desist letter, they explained "I'm sure you meant the site in good fun, but it (is) a serious violation of several clauses of our terms of service, including automating against the site and storing site data locally". Facebook felt that Unfaced was violating user's privacy by screenscraping the data and storing it elsewhere - they also pointed out that the use of "face" in the title may be a violation of the Facebook trademark (seems like a stretch - do they have a claim to the word "face"?). The other points, however, seem fair - they're reminiscent of the cease and desist letters sent to the MySpace dating sites.

Although bloggers tend to hate legal threats, Facebook is probably in the right here - they offer a Facebook API for outside development that makes it easy to build add-on services (although this didn't exist when UnFaced launched in the spring). Sites like Tixology have built useful services on the Facebook Developers platform, and had the sense to remove "Face" from the name to avoid confusion. MySpace, eBay, Google and other brands have to go after sites which contain their brand names - the case for defending "Face" isn't so strong, but it's still wise to avoid problems. It's also worth noting that screenscraping isn't the same as legitimately plugging in to the service - MySpace had a good case against scrapers like DatingAnyone, but the tendency to disable legitimate MySpace codes and widgets isn't acceptable.

Arrow would be wise to drop the project and move on - either that, or change the name and figure out a way to build a similar service using the Facebook API. Facebook offered to reinstate his account if he closed UnFaced, which sounds like a reasonable agreement. However, Arrow says that it's "unfortunate that Facebook views UnFaced as a threat" and plans to continue with the service. He's still accepting signups as of today, and wants to seek a "mutually beneficial relationship" with Facebook. Without radically changing the service, that ain't gonna happen.

    Compatibility testing with Unfaced


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