Pete Warden has written up a narrative of how he went from an interesting map of the United States to being sued by Facebook.

The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion…

What I find really interesting here is actually that Facebook (a known offender on the privacy front) is so cavalier as to expose this information via their API. That they would add a cherry on top by threatening to sue when the API gets, well, used is scarcely surprising.

This reminds me of a moment in college when one of my friends was trying to convince the registrar that SelfReg (our online registration tool) was leaky like a sieve, from a security standpoint. He didn’t make much headway until he presented the registrar with a list of ~1000 student names, addresses and social security numbers, gleaned from the system. (That’s out of 2000 potential students — he only started the collection script halfway through the registration period.)

That much exposed personal information is like overwhelming force. Unless it comes up against another, even more overwhelming force. Like a SLAPP lawsuit.