[lucb1e]

Dude realized "hey, you own your content, not Facebook, even after you post it on Facebook. So with users' consent, I can download their data from Facebook and display it on my own website, right?" Thus he wrote something where people would enter their Facebook and other social network logins, and the site would aggregate their data. Basically a cross-platform social network.

Facebook was the only website to respond at all. They sued them for downloading data. (You own it, but when you try to get it out, you can't.) Facebook called it "spamming" and "hacking". The courts didn't really understand the topic (the article claims) but finally in the 9th district court the spam claim got thrown out and Facebook said they won't challenge that decision because there is still the hacking claim to be fought over.

How asking someone to give you a password for a specific purpose and then using that password for that specific purpose is hacking is beyond me. But then the article is fairly one-sided so I don't know the full story. The legal battle continues.

[gwbas1c]

Maybe they were scraping or abusing an API? That's a bit of a stretch of "hacking."