Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

> It's data you made public by publishing it to LinkedIn, where default privacy settings is "anyone who can log into linkedin can view this content."

... under specific terms of use that scraping technically violates.

View on HN

There’s actually quite a bit of data that’s viewable to anyone, logged in or not, that’s public. All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. Sales people all across the world copy and paste data from LinkedIn to sales force every day. They either do it manually, using the app I worked on, or one of the literally hundreds of competitors.

So the argument is that you are abiding their days because other people are also doing it.... Great morality...

There's no moral issue here. Sales people are going in and copying and pasting data field by field, and we made that process more efficient. All that software did is replace multiple clicks with one. Scrape the DOM and dump it into their salesforce instance. A sales person still needs to initiate the action. I'm happy to admit that I don't like sales people, I don't like cold calls, and what we did made it slightly more efficient for them to cold call people. But calling it a/immoral or an invasion of privacy is silly, unless you've already established that cold calls are immoral and I missed that.

If you don't want your data scraped for collection, you wouldn't put it on Linkedin. Really the only argument is, is it more moral for Linkedin to do it instead of a plugin?

If there are literally hundreds of competitors why would we need you also being a jerk?

>All we did was speed up what was happening anyway.

I can think of a number of crimes where this statement is also true, so I'm not so certain it serves as an adequate defense.

I disagree with your implicit assumption that automated access is equivalent to a person viewing the data. Scale changes the results. Technology is making things possible at scales and economies that were not viable before, and people are slow to adjust.

It's one thing to have police stationed at a bus stop, waiting for a suspect to emerge. It's another to network facial recognition cameras across a city or country and log the motions of the entire population.

It's one thing to greet people in a grocery store and offer coupons for your product. It's another to (as discussed a couple days ago) install Bluetooth beacons in a variety of stores, install trojan packages in popular phone apps, and track people moving through stores.

It's one thing to browse LinkedIn for a person's profile, read the bio of an interesting candidate, and email them. It's another to slurp up 2000 candidates and send an email to all of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com