Ethics Question re: ToS for a Penny Auction Site | Hacker News Reader

Ethics Question re: ToS for a Penny Auction Site

2 pointsvessenes6 comments

I have recently gotten interested in a penny auction site, name withheld because I am likely violating their ToS.

All those low prices! All those people spending for bids! It piqued my interest.

So, I wrote a python script to pull some data automatically for history of bids. Then, I added some more. And some more.

Now, it keeps track of how many people are competing, and bids at the last possible second only when someone else might win, and it's very unlikely that anyone else will step in and reset the counter.

A recent auction I lost (I stepped out when the item went over my budget): the winner spent over $1,500 in bids by my estimate. I spent like $12.

So, HN, is this ethical? What should I do with this code? It's unlikely the Penny Auction site will be able to ban it without significant re-architecting. Heck, you could write it into a Chrome extension and it would be almost impossible to deal with programmatically.

I'm torn between enjoying getting cheap items now and then, open sourcing it, and getting in touch with the company to see what they think.

Advice welcomed!

Is this definitely against the ToS? My feeling is that this was bound to happen. This is analogous to ebay sniping services, no? Even if they don't like it happening, I would be surprised if this didn't become fairly commonplace. Worst case scenario (though IANAL so I don't know if there could possibly be any legal action taken) is that your IP / account gets banned for violating the ToS.

As a thought exercise, can this really hurt their business? As you mentioned, $1500+ was spent in bids alone. Even if you won, only the other person lost, not the auction site. Now when everyone starts doing this, everyone uses this software to bid up to their budget, and we're back to square one. So long as people have competitive budgets, bidding just continues as normal.

The ToS bans robots, so they clearly wish it to be against their ToS.

I am not clear at what level it's enforceable, other than banning me, probably they would not be allowed to keep anything of value I'm waiting to claim.

It seems clear so far that I have an advantage against non-bot-using bidders; I wouldn't like that if I were the CEO of the company, or if I were a bidder dutifully clicking over and over. I am not sure if it's unfair or not, hence the Ethics question here.

Penny auction sites are like slot machines: The House always wins. It shouldn't be possible to trick the public interface (if they've coded it right), so any bid placed will make them money. In fact, warring bots will only increase their profit, so they probably won't invoke the ToS, UNLESS it is also profitable for them to disqualify your winning bid, then put the item up for auction again, without reimbursing earlier losing bids.

But you don't mention having actually won anything, so unless you have, don't be so sure that your script is worth anything.

I haven't won anything yet, but there are only a few very expensive items auctioned per day. I lost one today -- my algorithm thought it likely someone else would outbid and it was wrong. Bummer! Again, I spent roughly one-sixth of the winner's bids.

I may turn this into an EC2 backed service on reflection, but of course, I need to win something first. ; ).

Or turning it into a weekend project, and launching it as a service, that could be another possibility.

cross reference cost/quality for various popular products on the penny auction with eBay and sell what you can.

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