Anyone else heard of Tim Berners-Lee's idea of hosting your data in pods outside the relevant corps wanting access to it and you controlling what's shared and how?
This is such a completely different way of doing it, I'm not sure of all the implications, be that from admin (how much effort) to security (would this be a massive hacking opportunity) etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/tim_bernerslee/
Taking action against scraping for hire
131–140 of 240 posts
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#132Collecting the rhetorical BS: "scraping attacks" Scraping is not an attack. Monopolists want to pretend they own your data because they get unlimited access to monetize it whereas competitors should have none. "self-compromised" Monopolists want to sell you thus it's imperative they maintain the fiction of "one person, one account". By admitting you own your account, they'd have to allow sharing and they wouldn't be…
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Cough, cough, Google, cough, cough…
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve done some jquery shenanigans on my Facebook friends page to “export” my friend list so I can retake control of my friend relationships (disintermediation for the in-crowd).
So easy to push data in to Facebook, so hard to get even basic data out of it.
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#133Collecting the rhetorical BS: "scraping attacks" Scraping is not an attack. Monopolists want to pretend they own your data because they get unlimited access to monetize it whereas competitors should have none. "self-compromised" Monopolists want to sell you thus it's imperative they maintain the fiction of "one person, one account". By admitting you own your account, they'd have to allow sharing and they wouldn't be…
Quoted post unavailable.
Pretty ironic that Mark Z himself started out exactly like this: scraping Harvard servers and photos to power facemash.
He subsequently realized that he doesn’t need to scrape if he can just make a viral site that lets people share this info with each other while he can eavesdrop on ALL OF IT:
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#134In the early days of FB, they convinced people that pages (or some content, sorry I do not know the FB terms) could be public for anyone to view without needing to login to FB. This was very helpful for small businesses and communities. In many countries this is still the quickest place to make a public page. Though now, every small business or community page I want to visit is locked out unless I login FB. Even if I…
I am currently in the USA and when I visit a public FB page e.g. [1], there is a small login header, and a very big annoying footer login. I estimate 15% of the content is blocked. I had spent the past year outside USA until one month ago. When I visited the same sites while traveling outside the USA, the annoying login footer moves to the middle of the page blocking almost all content. I do not have proof at the moment, but that was my experience trying to read 95% of government, business, and community pages who are almost all on FB.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/ParquesNacionalesdeArgentinaRe: Taking action against scraping for hire
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's their platform. Do you really want some random companies scraping your facebook and instagram posts?
As others said, there is no “you” in the scheme. It's Facebook's data. When people access that data without paying, they are “bad guys”. When the very same people pay for it, they are “legal partners”. In both cases they can do anything with it, while Facebook can't be held responsible because of all the official agreements. So as long as there is no specifically bad publicity or money loss anything goes either way.…
What you are claiming here is not true in Europe. If FB hold data about you, the data is still your legal right. You can have it deleted and changed if it is somehow untrue and have variou other rights too.
There is a relationship involved because ultimately as a FB user, if I don't like what they are doing, I can ask them to remove my data permanently and they must legally do that. If someone has "scraped" that data (if it is considered PID), without my permission or a legal basis to do so, they are in breach of the GDPR and can have enforcement taken against them.
I think some of these "aggregation" businesses will fall foul of this in Europe but I don't know what will realistically happen if that business does not exist in Europe and breaches the GDPR.
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person who ran the bot. Programs do not have agency, they are just tools. That's like saying "If the gun fires the bullet, who is liable for murder?" It's a silly question.
> That's like saying "If the gun fires the bullet, who is liable for murder?" It's a silly question. I don't know I've seen several people unironically argue that it should be the gun's manufacturer.
Probably should also add "successfully", there's a reason NYPD had/has guns that require 12 pounds of force to pull the trigger (instead of a normal ~5 lbs).
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I love to hate on Meta, but their actions here are spot on and make my morning very enjoyable as I sip my cup of coffee. You might want to reassess your intelligence there friend. It seems to be suffering from a common form of cogntive dissonance combined with some form of confirmation bias. How so? Well you clearly don't like scraping, otherwise you wouldn't be agreeing with a criminal... So there's the confirmati…
This is a total non-sequitur argument here. You've gone from accusing me of lack of intelligence to suffering from cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, to Facebook's terrible security practices: simply because I'm pleased that an organization has taken action against Web scrapers for violation of Terms of Service. Yes, I've gone on record indicating that I believe Web scraping to be generally unethical, and th…
Let me restate this how I view what you've stated: your position is that because Facebook has a Terms of Service that may define something that is not illegal - means that one must abide by it? Also... Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg have lied over and over and over very publicly to get their way or to give themselves an advantage: by giving themselves unfettered and unwarranted access to data that they profit from by their own fast and loose rules.
If Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg are OK with lying, stealing and cheating - then why should anyone leveraging their online properties need to abide? Until they're held accountable under broader rules I see no reason the consumption side can't bend them as well. And you may argue "this isn't how it works" but we all know this isn't how Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg operate. They operate under the premise of: do whatever makes us money because breaking the rules is the cost of doing business. So, no - they don't get to spew propaganda to the advantage of their business under the guise of protecting users. That is complete and utter bullshit.
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I think this is more like the Cambridge Analytica situation.
Did FB ever take any legal action against Cambridge Analytica? I can't remember anything about it and this sounds very similar to that (although back in those days FB's tools made this incredibly easy).
No. FBs ToS at the time [1] allowed CA to do what they did.
Namely, CA didn't resell the data or give it to an ad agency.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180329131546/https://developer...
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
ToS have been around for decades, surely this question is settled by now?
Former attorney turned software developer here! Nope, it's not a settled question in the way that I think you mean. Each ToS is different so each would be subject to individual legal analysis in court on its own terms. Questions would include whether the ToS is unconscionable, whether the terms violate laws of the locality/nation, and so forth. It's the same with traditional contracts - the fact that contracts have b…
So even the general question of "Whether terms of service constitute an enforceable contract" depends on each individual ToS?
Re: Taking action against scraping for hire
#140Ironically, Octopus reminds me of "Octopus VR" in the Silicon Valley show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltFB4WBdDg4
"It's a water animal"