Why is Facebook scraping the links in my private messages?

nothing is private on facebook. to operate in any other way is to be disappointed. much like advice in relationship posts, listen to what mark zuckerberg is telling you, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb fucks."

The usability reason for doing this for private messages is because it gives a visual verification that your link points to where you intent it to point. For novice web users, sending a wrong link is a scary possibility. It is technically possible to scrape them if those pages are open for anyone, but scraping interesting data from content outside of Facebook is much more uncertain process than scraping interesting data from inside Facebook, because the pages you link have no known helpful structure for analyzing what data is what (or they have structure, but it can be any of the endless possible structures). If your documents are not blatantly about contender for Facebook, or part of criminal investigation, I don't think they never would bother putting human eyes to the task. -- They are able to scrape it, but there needs to be a plan for what to exactly look from the content and what to do with the findings or it is just noise. Of course, you can just break the link so that facebook doesn't recognize it as a link anymore. '*ttp://docs.google.com/... , replace * with h.' could be enough.

Why don't you just ask your friends for their email address?

They're just running your link through a redirector so they know who is clicking what at all times.

Can you explain a bit more what you mean by "scraping" here? If someone sends you a private message with a link in it, Facebook already knows the URL and would be able to see what it leads to whether you click on it or not. I imagine they're adding www.facebook.com to the front of the link just so they can tell that you've clicked on it (and then instantly redirect you), not because your act of clicking on it gives them access to any other kind of special knowledge about the linked site. The data they gather this way is useful to them somehow, or maybe they're just collecting it in case it becomes useful sometime in the future. The way they grab material from the site you've linked in order to display thumbnails and a description is different, but I'm not sure what the issue is with that. They're just excerpting part of the public web, the same part as they could get by just following the link.

This isn't exactly new -- Gmail (which you appear to use) has been http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Privacy in order to display contextual advertising for years. It's just a question of whether you trust Facebook to handle your private communications responsibly any less than Google, your ISP, or the feds.

They're just running your link through a redirector so they know who is clicking what at all times.Actually, I think Facebook follows redirectors like bit.lyIf someone sends you a private message with a link in it, Facebook already knows the URL and would be able to see what it leads to whether you click on it or not.I think the problem may be something posted online, but only meant for a few people to see. The obvious example would be prototypes of new websites. If they URL isn't meant to be long-lived, then it's not really a big deal if the URL itself gets stored, what's annoying is the fact that they actually scrape the website and extract the text. The other annoying thing is that they scrape the text badly. They don't show an actual image preview like google does now for search results, it's just some scraped text. I would just keep using that password protecting redirector, if you include the password in the message, that would probably be fine.

Occasionally, if the link leads to a virus or a phishing page, they can make the link lead to an error page instead too, I believe.

you can check this by right clicking on a link and it will add their own URL in front of it Putting links through a redirector doesn't necessarily mean that facebook scrapes the content. The two are completely separate things. They could theoretically run a click-tracking redirector and never read one byte of content at the destination. All that the l.php script does is record the click and then send a redirect header to tell the browser to go elsewhere. (Please note that I'm not claiming that Facebook doesn't also scrape content, just that seeing a redirector in front of a link is in no way proof of anything.)