Exactly. Obvious example would be whatever data facebook uses to determine what's interesting and to put in your newsfeed. If it's just profile views, that's your data, but if I were building a site running at facebook scale, I'd be performing the final calculation using some intermediate data massaged by some totally top zecret algorithms.
I agree. It doesn't seem so outrageous to me that, after sending a CD worth of data, they drew a line.
At a certain level of detail, what they report back is going to start revealing internal secrets and IP, such as data models or algorithms. And given the volume of data that they did, provide, I find it plausible that they've drawn the line in an appropriate place.
The headline is sensationalist scaremongering. A careful read shows that it's not the data itself that's IP, but that the form in which it's presented reveals Facebook's IP.
As an example of this specific kind of data, run this bookmarklet on any facebook page to get their calculations of who is most interesting/important to you. Note: this requires trusting thekeesh.com with your data.
From playing with it myself, it looks like the rankings are calculated within a sliding window, i.e. who's updates are most interesting to you _now_. This is probably data calculated using various correlation coefficients that FB has legitimately researched on their own using the data that we give them. The data I give them is mine, the inferences they draw from it is theirs.
This is interesting but as a general rule I'd advise against giving a third-party, non-HTTPS, obfuscated Javascript the ability to rummage around inside your Facebook session.
