"Facebook has also, inexplicably, disabled his personal account."
Sure they can try and justify blocking the application by saying it made 'excessive API calls', but how do they justify disabling his personal account?
My guess is that the system that does this is completely automated. The number of API calls his app was making set off a flag for spam/spammer and his account was disabled accordingly.
Until he contacted them I wonder if any human was even aware that his app had been blocked. The interesting question here is how Facebook will respond in this instance.
I think a more reasonable interpretation is the app was pulled for being spammy and the developer of the app was pulled for being a spammer. I think the implication that there is something sinister in this is reaching.
Breakup Notifier only sent out email notifications for relationship changes for those who explicitly asked for them. You could easily disable it by either personally blocking the app on Facebook, or unselecting those friends.
I wasn't making a judgement about whether I thought it was spammy, but what I considered a more likely interpretation of the available data to be. I'm also lumping everything of the nature "does abide by Facebook's terms" in the "spammy" bucket.
Sure they can try and justify blocking the application by saying it made 'excessive API calls', but how do they justify disabling his personal account?