After Parakey and Friendfeed, Facebook acquired Octazen solutions a few days ago.

Talent acquisition, technology acquisition, preventive acquisition in order to avoid Octazen to provide its scraping contacts services to competitors ? Techcrunch and GigaOm are asking

In an article titled “Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why?“, Techcrunch is pointing to many questions related to what the company is doing:

What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data.

One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multple souces. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most.

But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening.

Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be).

The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested.