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I can't seem to find a reason why "screen scraping" is important here, as oppose to just scraping? My understanding is that screen scraping is taking a picture of the rendered website and using an OCR or some other sort of recognition tools to extract the data. If it is just scraping - it should be perfectly legal right?
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…
Seems like any web browser by a for-profit company would immediately be in breach.
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…
> You may not ... use the content of the Site for public or commercial purposes That's not what the app was doing: > The app ... had been ‘screen scraping’ accounts for members So it wasn't "public or commercial", it was for people who had accounts to view/manage their account details. Same as Plaid or Mint for banks, or (more generally) any old web browser for literally any website.
The funny thing is, American sends points data to my email. I wonder if that sort of thing could be leveraged for something similar.
I can't seem to find a reason why "screen scraping" is important here, as oppose to just scraping? My understanding is that screen scraping is taking a picture of the rendered website and using an OCR or some other sort of recognition tools to extract the data. If it is just scraping - it should be perfectly legal right?
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…
https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…
That would instead be the AAdvantage (AA's reward program) member, who agreed to the TOS originally, and who provided their login information to the TPG app so that it can scrape information about rewards etc.
So... the lawsuit from AA's side seems pretty bizarre, if the facts as presented in this article are true. If AA wanted to stop this, presumably they should sue their own rewards members who use the TPG app. But obviously that won't happen.
So fundamentally, this seems a case of whether the toolmaker is liable for an individual using their tool in a TOS-violating way.
Which seems pretty insane, if AA wins. If I pull open Chrome developer tools after logging into a website that requires me not to inspect its source, why would Google be liable?
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And as a side note, "Because privacy and security" is quickly becoming the corporate anti-interoperability equivalent of "Think of the children."
The default should be that scraping is allowed.
If companies actually care about privacy and security, then they can offer an API and encourage access through it. But limiting scraping and not offering API access (or intentionally crippling it) is bullshit.