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Taking action against scraping for hire

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Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#181

Post by marlowe221 »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #139
marlowe221 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Congress or a state legislature could pass a law that says "No terms of service are ever enforceable" but to my knowledge no one has done that.

So, under the current state of the law whether or not a contract is enforceable depends entirely on what the terms in that specific contract are.

Unfortunately, this is yet another instance where the law has failed to keep up with technology. Contract laws (at least in the USA) date back long before anyone ever dreamed up the idea of a EULA or ToS. Our laws contemplate two or more parties with roughly equal bargaining power sitting down and hashing things out, and go from there.

Laws based on that assumption are a pretty poor fit for a world filled with EULAs and ToS but it's what we are stuck with at the moment.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#182

Post by ogurechny »

lbriner wrote: post #135
ogurechny wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is how it works in press releases. The problem is that data protection laws were in fact lobbied by corporations either openly or behind the scenes, and focus on things like real names and passport numbers that look impressive but aren't really important for the data market. These are just put into some high security database (e.g. for billing info), and it's fine. However, the real behavioral data that costs money is shared as easy as it ever was in the form of “User ID was at the location of Wi-Fi AP ID ”. It doesn't matter that the data owner still trades all the history of activity of a certain individual, or that Wi-Fi station locations can be matched with some external database. Everything is fine as long as you don't slap someone's real name on that. And, contrary to the show social networks make, they couldn't care less about real names. Even if you trick the system by calling yourself John Doe, you still look at the specific content, and have specific contacts, you are you, and the data is the same.

I remember that about a decade ago some IT guys have paid for the common Facebook advertiser access, then targeted the ad campaigns using filters in such a way that their intersection only resulted in a single user, or just a couple of them, and were able to match those “anonymized” accounts to real ones. You didn't have to be a genius to do that. Facebook certainly knew it could be used like that. Everyone who made money on that simply agreed to use “anonymization” as a smokescreen. Later, with all the scandals, those routine operations were presented as something exceptional done by a small number of bad actors.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#183

Post by kbenson »

utahcon wrote: post #150
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting 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…

The only argument I have here (sadly in favor of FB) is with "safeguard people against clone sites". While I did give my data to FB, I didn't approve that transfer to another site/system. That is the only place I could possibly see some legal foot hold.

It's impossible to control information once been created. The longer it's existed and the more locations you can see it make that spread exponentially more likely.

Wehether we make that spread of informationlegal or not does little to affect whether it happens.

There are two things that might help. First, don't share as much information. Once it's no longer limited to you or your close group of friends which hopefully won't share it along with your name, it's mostly out of your control. Second, put limits (laws) on what information companies are able to synthesize about you, and how long they can retain it. If there's less information created about you (or it's ephemeral, created and destroyed as needed), and if they need to clean out older data, there's less to be shared or stolen.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#184

Post by treis »

jhoelzel wrote: post #94
curiousllama wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you start a business on the violation. "Since when do I get sued for taking too many free samples from Costco?" -> "Since you started taking millions of them to resell"

im not sure on american law, but if you give me those samples willingly i can do whatever i want with them. Actually this is the reason why many products come with the lable "not for resale" but i have yet to find somebody who cares about it :D

>give me those samples willingly

Doesn't seem like Facebook is giving them willingly.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#185

Post by macinjosh »

blantonl wrote: post #70
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting 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.

Google search's business model is scraping the web, indexing it, and then pasting ads all over their search results made up of other people's content. If Google can build a business on third-party data then these meta scrapers can do the same thing.

It is like saying a photographer can't photograph a building from the street because she doesn't own it. The building is there, taking a picture takes nothing from the building. That is all that is going on here, repeating publicly available information.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#187

Post by postalrat »

htrp wrote: post #13

This is different from LinkedIn v HiQ because HiQ was only scraping publicly available data that was generally accessible to the broader internet. In these two cases, the data is being scraped from FB/Insta using credentials that the client handed over or the mass creation of accounts solely for scraping purposes.

What would be your position the data being scraped is data the site is selectively providing google for indexing but don't provide publicly.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#188

Post by postalrat »

xvector wrote: post #30

HN is hypocritical - most commenters here are against this because "Meta bad," but at the same time, most commenters wouldn't want their posts shared privately amongst friends to be scraped and made available publicly.

Who is scraping their private messages? Themselves or their friends?

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#190

Post by greatgib »

noslenwerdna wrote: post #162
iandanforth wrote: post #59

Collecting 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…

The users agreed to share their data with Facebook, not some other company. If they didn't prevent this, they'd be asking for another Cambridge Analytica

The user agreed in facebook to have is data "public", so it can't complain that a robot scrap it.

Nothing prevents him to restrict access to his pages an data to "trusted" friends.

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