A Boulder entrepreneur destroyed a database that showed regional patterns among 210 million Facebook users after the social-networking site accused the Colorado man of misusing the site and threatened to sue. Pete Warden said he had planned to share the information he gathered with researchers. Facebook countered that Warden gathered the data without permission, violating rules of the site.
Warden recently announced he had destroyed the data, including his own copy. He said he wasn’t convinced that what he did was illegal but said he couldn’t afford to fight a lawsuit. Warden said he starting compiling the data while developing a search engine for his startup company.
He built the database using a Web crawler, which automatically scans the Internet and indexes certain types of information. Spokesman Andrew Noyes said Facebook’s posted rules bar the use of Web crawlers without permission.
