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Taking action against scraping for hire

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Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#231

Post by Kwpolska »

kube-system wrote: post #199
greatgib wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The description in the article sounds like it scrapes private profile data. > Octopus designed the software to scrape data accessible to the user when logged into their accounts

Were they showing the private data to everyone, or just to the person whose account was used for the scraping? If it’s the latter, then this is also not a crime, it is just someone accessing data they have been authorized to access, but in an automated way.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#232

Post by TechBro8615 »

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…

Indeed. It's the height of hypocrisy for a company to define the borders of its own system and then prosecute those who they consider in violation of them. There is no consideration given to whether the data should have been collected and retained by Facebook in the first place, regardless of whatever arbitrary access policies they defined to fit their own business and data model.

It's not clear what Facebook's position on scraping truly is. Sometimes they downplay it as "normalized and widespread," and other times they castigate it as inexplicably legal and clearly immoral, or even outright "in violation of state and federal law." For example:

- April 2021. Researchers find an exposed database containing the scraped data of 533 million facebook users. Some news reports refer to it as a "breach." Facebook attempts to downplay the issue as the result of third party scraping. Headline in ZDNet: "Internal Facebook email reveals intent to frame data scraping as ‘normalized, broad industry issue’" [0]

- October 2020. Facebook announces lawsuits against companies it claimed created a "malicious extension on Google’s Chrome Web Store designed to scrape Facebook, in violation of Facebook’s Terms and Policies and state and federal law." [1]

So... which is it? Does Facebook believe that scraping is a "broad, normalized industry issue?" Or is it a violation of "state and federal law?" It seems like they measure severity of its impact primarily based on the reactions of political commentators.

And what's the difference between automating a browser and automating an API client? Why did Facebook design an API for accessing the data they collected, if it's illegal to collect? They've even claimed to be the victim of Cambridge Analytica, who purchased a "quiz" application created by a developer who pieced it together using code straight from the "examples" section of Facebook's API documentation.

There is one obvious resolution to this apparent contradiction. If we remove Facebook from the question, then the contradiction resolves itself. All we need to do is stop presuming that Facebook has the right to collect and retain this data in the first place. And as a user, if you publish your data to a website designed for sharing it with other people, then by definition it is no longer private data. Therein lies the central question: what is "semi-private" data, and who controls its boundaries?

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-internal-email-reveal...

[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/taking-legal-action-agains...

p.s. another thing they never mention is why companies want to scrape lists of facebook users. perhaps it might have something to do with the "lookalike audience" feature, and its more precisely targetable predecessors, which allow advertisers to upload a list of usernames and email addresses for targeted advertising?

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#233

Post by EMIRELADERO »

brushfoot wrote: post #151
samsoftstuff wrote: post #74

It's like they don't know that courts just made it legal: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

From the article: "[T]he Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act." The key phrase is "publicly accessible." This wasn't that. The scraping was done by automating Facebook accounts, which have terms of service, which forbid scraping. ToS/EULAs make a big difference. They're the reason…

> ToS/EULAs make a big difference. They're the reason Blizzard could shut down bnetd's StarCraft server. They're why no one can legally reverse engineer Oracle to create a drop-in replacement, despite interoperability provisions.

Strictly referencing EULAs for user-owned copies of software here, not ToS:

That is not true. The Blizzard court clearly erred in not considering unconscionability when analyzing the EULA. As for Oracle, the interoperability provisions are what overrides that part of the EULA.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#234

Post by gfodor »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #106
gfodor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false expectation and it’s important people learn this.

They’ll stop posting in the way they currently enjoy and will, therefore, have lost some freedom. Great outcome! In other news: your partner may also leak your most intimate secrets. I hope they do, to teach you a lesson? Every trust can be betrayed. Why do you believe a world without trust would be better? Only because you cannot handle the nuance of different levels of trust?

The counterparty risk from Facebook has almost nothing to do with trust of individual human beings. It has to do with the nature of systems, failure, vulnerabilities, attack surface area, etc. It's "privacy through obscurity" to act in a way that your data is not on the precipice of being leaked by a bad actor or a mistake.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#235

Post by Mo3 »

pr0zac wrote: post #191
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…

While I agree with your assessment of the BS in the article wrt scraping, and also agree with your assessment that the behaviour is completely about FB protecting itself and its monopoly control (the word control being important), I think its important to emphasize its not about FB caring whether other entities having access to the data, its about FB caring about it's public perception with regard to its having that…

The example you stated is a truly fantastic one. Graph Search was pretty much like a direct API into their front facing network.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#236

Post by woojoo666 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #106
gfodor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false expectation and it’s important people learn this.

They’ll stop posting in the way they currently enjoy and will, therefore, have lost some freedom. Great outcome! In other news: your partner may also leak your most intimate secrets. I hope they do, to teach you a lesson? Every trust can be betrayed. Why do you believe a world without trust would be better? Only because you cannot handle the nuance of different levels of trust?

> In other news: your partner may also leak your most intimate secrets

Indeed, and that's why it's important to choose the right partner. Likewise, it's important to choose the right friends on instagram to share your photos with. Because as you noted, they can always screenshot away and there's nothing Facebook can do.

What's dangerous is thinking that Facebook/Meta is the keyholder. That's a false perception, perpetrated by Facebook because they want to monopolize everyone's data. It was and always will be about the people who you share your information with. Don't want your profile scraped and leaked? Don't share it with sketchy people.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#237

Post by wraptile »

car_analogy wrote: post #180
kordlessagain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has hidden much of Instagram's content behind logins, so that makes most of it "not public". At the same time, I don't think all of Instagram's users care if their images are hidden, or not. It's quite unfortunate Facebook/Meta is using hostile language and the word "scraping" together in this case. Scraping is a legitimate process used by various business models to gather information from the Web, which its…

> Facebook has hidden much of Instagram's content behind logins, so that makes most of it "not public". 1) It was public when the content was posted by its authors. Facebook locked it down retroactively, regardless of the author's intent. 2) A login requirement doesn't make it non-public, if making an account is trivial, and there are already hundreds of millions of accounts. Is the plot of Avengers: Endgame also not…

Also login requirement is not certain. e.g. Google doesn't need to login to index those pages, neither do you for first few profiles. Only after your identity (ip or fingerprint) is know instagram starts locking public content behind login gates.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#238

Post by jasfi »

stefan_ wrote: post #221
jasfi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very good point, but surely it was taken into consideration when scraping was declared legal?

All that case says is "scraping is not a violation of the CFAA". But of course the scraped data still exists in legal limbo; maybe you can compute derived information from it, but the moment a scraper reproduces it there is all of copyright law waiting for them.

In that case, the user owns the copyright, not the company, as the user is the author. So it would be up to them to take legal action if deemed necessary.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#239

Post by SergeAx »

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…

I don't get the thing about "monopoly".

Let's start with one thing: copyright on databases. Take IMDb: they collect and combine totally open data on movies cast, crew, soundtracks used and so on. Everyone can go to the cinema, wait until movie ends, write down data from credits roll and put it on the database. There's no prohibition on this activity. Cinema may prohibit filming inside, but not using pencil on paper. Or you may buy a DVD released later, and do just the same. Or you may even write a movie company email asking for those data in electronic form and chances are they will send it to you or point to some promo materials website where it is published already.

But the entire database is a product of work, and that makes it valuable. So the company or organization spent time and money collecting, indexing and cross-linking those data, and has a right to bank on that work. Easily copying that database for commercial purpose _is_ stealing. This is why we have a database copyright laws.

Now back to Meta. They created this product and made it attractive enough so people are adding their data voluntary. Every single piece of data is quite open (maybe not really so for personal bits like face photos, emails and phone numbers). Meta spent a lot of cash making and keeping product that attractive, and now banks on those collected data by targeting ads.

Nothing in the world prohibits everyone else to create a service, make it valuable, attract people, collect data (according to data collection laws) and bank on that. But just copying data collected my Meta is stealing, and Meta is in its own right to protect it. The fact that Meta did it before doesn't makes it monopolist. In fact, there are lots of companies doing the same, like Google, Amazon, Apple, eBay etc. So in my opinion it is not a monopoly defending its' position, but rather business defending its' assets from stealing.

Re: Taking action against scraping for hire

#240

Post by ConstantVigil »

windexh8er wrote: post #137
blantonl wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you. This is pretty much what I am getting at as well, though in different words.

But of course, the general populous thinks it knows better than the people who actually know best. That being those of us who have been able to live our lives while learning from not just our mistakes; but others around them.

We are the rare and few; and considered the enemy to the mob. Good luck comrade.

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