Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Robert Scoble's Facebook account was disabled today (only to be later turned back on) because he ran a script that scraped their site and therefore violated their Terms if Use. He knew what he was doing:

I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service.

And he broke these terms of use:

In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to:

* harvest or collect email addresses or other contact information of other users from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications;

* use the Service or the Site in any unlawful manner or in any other manner that could damage, disable, overburden or impair the Site;

* use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;

Nick Carr gets it right:

Facebook has an obligation to protect the data entrusted to it by its members. At the very least, members should have the right to decide whether or not their personal information can be scraped out of the Facebook database. Scoble did not give them that choice. That doesn't mean that Facebook is the hero. It, like other social networks, happily scrapes information from members' email accounts to identify possible new members. Facebook will scrape when it suits its commercial interest but will block scraping when it doesn't. Still, in this particular case, Facebook did what it needed to do: protect the information and the interests of its members. Until controls are in place, unauthorized scraping of other members' personal information shouldn't be allowed.

Mathew Ingram asks who the data belongs to:

The big question here — which the Scobleizer has cleverly put himself at the centre of — is: Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?

Facebook's Terms of Use is pretty clear; the data belongs to them:

All content on the Site and available through the Service, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, music, sound and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved. No Site Content may be modified, copied, distributed, framed, reproduced, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted, transmitted, or sold in any form or by any means, in whole or in part, without the Company's prior written permission, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally post on the Site.

Robert's contacts' information does not belong to him; it belongs to his contacts.In fact, the only information that belongs to him is the list contact names that he already had and may have imported to determine if those contacts were also Facebook users. Friending someone in Facebook let's you see their information - it does not grant you the license to use it somewhere else. Dare Obasanjo makes this point also.

Yes it would be great if Facebook let you take that information away in some portable format. But they don't. And we all knew that when we signed up for the service, and for as long as we continue to use the service.

But please don't claim to be the victim when you break the rules you agreed to and the service you are using kicks you off.