Easier to apologize than ask permission, I presume:
Legal threats from Facebook have led to the destruction of a social science dataset about to be released to researchers.
Lawyers from the social networking site contacted Pete Warden, an entrepreneur based in Boulder, Colorado, in February after he announced plans to release data he had collected from the public profiles of 210 million Facebook users.
Warden says that Facebook threatened legal action if he did not delete the data. He duly destroyed all the records, saying he did not have the funds to contest a lawsuit.
Warden's records included a "social graph", a representation of all the friend connections between users in the dataset. This would have been a powerful research tool for social scientists and others interested in how people interact.
More than 50 researchers had requested copies of the dataset, says Warden, after he had blogged about making it available. He had already used the graph to show how the social connections of the 120 million US users his data covered were apparently concentrated in regional clusters.
...Warden obtained the data by writing "crawler" software that harvested information from Facebook profile pages which could be viewed without logging in to the site.
He gathered users' names, locations, friends and interests, but planned to remove names and use other anonymisation methods to prevent specific profiles being linked to individuals.
In compiling his data without seeking permission, Warden had violated the site's terms of service, said a Facebook spokesperson, adding: "Warden was extremely cooperative with Facebook from the moment we contacted him and he abandoned his plans."
Easier to apologize than ask permission, I presume: 
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