If Facebook reinstates Scoble will they do it for us too?

...or is each case decided on PR clout?

Mike Butcher at TCUK points to Robert Scoble getting thrown off Facebook, he was also kind enough to talk about our case a few months back too - the reactions, as you can see, are wildly different - ah, Fame

At the time we were kicked off, a better known US blogger had the same happen, for the same reason - not using his "real name" (Jon Swift was the pseudonym). As he was better known the hue and cry had him reinstated, with us (the Broadstuff blog) it did not happen.

Ah, Fame

What really p*ssed us off was we had just set up the "proper" blog profile as a Facebook Page (it had finally allowed non-people to set up), and that was banned too despite being totally OK.

Scoble's case is quite interesting though- he was scraping his social net off Facebook, and it does create the issue re "whose data is this?". If I put up profile data and am connected to Scoble, is it his to scrape without my permission? I would argue this is a subset of copyright law and the answer - today anyway - would be no, as it's hard to imagine a Fair Use case that could be made. (In Facebook's case its moot as they have given themselves total rights, but no doubt they would argue copyright infringement).

Go figure....

By the way, we had no prior notice of being disabled - it just happened - no "can you change your name" etc etc. Since being disabled, we have attempted to get some comment from Facebook on the status of our data - is it still there, is it deleted etc etc - but to no avail. For all I know our RSS blogfeeds are still going in. In my last mail we told Facebook if we hadn't had an answer by year end we would be taking up the matter with the Data Protection authorities in the UK and Europe.

It's now New Year and still no answer. Tomorrow we start the process............in our case, the Facebook backlash starts on 4 Jan 2008. When will yours start?

Update - Nick Carr makes much the same point re data ownership.