Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
1–8 of 8 posts
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#2Super interesting! How does the data get fetched? Not all of these services have APIs to get this data. Does Gandalf just scrape this data?
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#3Does this function with a front-end scrape the way Plaid did for a period of time?
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#4Does this function with a front-end scrape the way Plaid did for a period of time?
> With Gandalf, requesting user data is as easy as adding our URL to your website or app. Your end-users sign in to services (e.g Netflix, Amazon) in the same way they usually do, on their official website(s). Gandalf takes care of the rest, leveraging App Clips & WebViews for a magical, user-driven experience.
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#5Does this function with a front-end scrape the way Plaid did for a period of time?
It's a little similar to how Plaid worked but different in that authentication into the services happens on the user's device.
This is in contrast to the other kind of scraping where the end-user has to trust Plaid (or whoever) with their passwords, Gandalf triggers an App Clip with a WebView that lets the user authenticate (in the same way they'd do on their browser) without compromising creds, then scraping happens.
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#6Super interesting! How does the data get fetched? Not all of these services have APIs to get this data. Does Gandalf just scrape this data?
Yup, it's essentially scraping - but with a few implementation differences compared to what exist(ed) before.
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#7Very cool. What I don't understand in these cases is how you'd deal with platforms changing their ToS, agressively banning scraping, or even, randomly changing their UI and thus breaking your product for a while.
Re: Show HN: Plaid-like SDK for consumer data (i.e Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc.)
#8Very cool. What I don't understand in these cases is how you'd deal with platforms changing their ToS, agressively banning scraping, or even, randomly changing their UI and thus breaking your product for a while.
The random UI change(s) is something we have to detect really quickly & fix - or maybe in the future use AI models to read the data (if there was a way to ascertain that there's be no hallucinations).
Per the ToS and scraping, the way the SDK is built is akin to if we had a browser like Brave, Gener8 or even Chrome itself. These browsers essentially already "scrape" what the user is doing.
We think end-users should & will always have the right to always decide how they'll browse the web and can share whatever they choose to.
It's also similar to installing a chrome extension that does the "scraping" for you - just with a much smoother UX, we think the end-user should always have a right to decide to do stuff like this.
Lastly, we stay clear of any intellectual property, the only data we collect on behalf of the user is data on activity that they generate - so for example, Gandalf can tell the title of the show a user watched on Netflix, but we do not scrape images, video content, anything that's Netflix's IP.