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blodovnik

Why is this a big deal?

Of course recruiters search public information.

Learn to live with it.

If your outrage threshold is this low then you’re going to spent all your life in a state of outrage.

It’s nit even interesting let alone important.

Information in github, far from being surrounded by an invisible force field of integrity protection, is actually prime hunting territory for recruiters and any recruiter who doesn’t mine it probably needs to explain to their boss why they’re doing such a bad job.

The recruiter in question, far from being apologetic should have said “yes of course I got your email from GitHub so what?”

The guy recommends avoiding this recruiter. I recommend you use this recruiter as they clearly display basic competence at the task of recruiting.

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This is a big deal because the recruiter is in clear violation of the GitHub ToS[0]. Quoting from section H: "You may not use the API to download data or Content from GitHub for spamming purposes, including for the purposes of selling GitHub users' personal information, such as to recruiters, headhunters, and job boards."

Of course recruiters are incapable of sound ethical judgement. Part of living with people who have poor ethics is enacting rules which force them to conform or be excluded.

If your ability to care about rules is this low, then you're going to spend all of your life in a state of imminent lawlessness.

Your typos are honestly more interesting than anything else; your message isn't important, just wrong and at the top of the page.

I hope that you are ready to explain CCPA to your boss. I won't accuse you of doing a bad job, though.

The recruiter in question, like all recruiters, is to be avoided when possible. Avoid rent-seeking and grifting.

[0] https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-terms-of-service#...

You could take the API info you're looking for and then cross reference it with a simple GitHub user search, filtering for users that have "available for hire" selected in their profile.

I used this method years ago, albeit manually. I didn't have much luck though as it's akin to cold calling.

I found it much easier to pay a job and let the interested candidates come to you.

It's not obvious to me why the recruiter in question is in violation of this rule. The rules bans someone from extracting information with GitHub API and selling such information to recruiters. It does not seem to ban recruiters from acquiring this information themselves.

It’s not spam for a recruiter to send an email to a developer.

Spam is defined as “unsolicited bulk email”.

Https://spamhaus.org/consumer/definition

It’s a one off, not hulk, so recruiters emailing developer emails found on GitHub isn’t spamming.

Nor is the email address being sold in this case so that aspect of GitHub terms is not being violated.

So in fact you’re wrong and it’s perfectly legitimate for recruiters to use email addresses from GitHub and email them asking about jobs.

> Spam is defined as “unsolicited bulk email”.

More commonly, unsolicited/unwanted commercial email, see, e.g.:

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam

The commercial aspect is a red-herring, because B2B where there's an existing business relationship are normally excluded from spam laws.

The UBE (unsolicited, bulk, email) definition is the one used by most blocklists and filters and ISP AUPs.

> The commercial aspect is a red-herring

No, it's not

> because B2B where there's an existing business relationship are normally excluded from spam laws.

That's not just B2B, but that's part of the definition of “unsolicited”, it doesn't make the commercial part is a red-herring, either in general or in the context of this thread, which did not involve either a pre-existing business relationship or, since you unnecessarily called it out as relevant, a B2B interaction.

> The UBE (unsolicited, bulk, email) definition is the one used by most blocklists and filters

That's because “bulk”, unlike “commercial”, is easily detectable. (And also because because bulk has the most impact, because, bulk.)

> and ISP AUPs.

Virtually all ISP AUPs include prohibition on unlawful use which includes violations of laws concerning unsolicited commercial email.

The "bulk" definition is more widespread and is the definition that's enforced more often. So, mentioning "commercial" is weird because most service providers don't care whether it's commercial or not, they care whether it's bulk or not.

My first though after reading that a recruiter used GitHub API was "I wish I met a recruiter like that".

More likely they used some tool to do it.

Don't know what type of email he had received. Personally I think it's pretty OK for HR to contract me, but not by sending automatic/template emails.

Notice he said "(they) used the GitHub API to pull my email address", and GitHub API can be used to massively fetch these kind of information for automatic spamming.

Imagine one day you wake up in the morning by few dozens of automatic recruit emails inviting you for a job which don't fit your profile even a bit, will you be happy? This happened to me few times and I'm not very happy about it.

I agreed GitHub shouldn't take the blame because you can hide your email in the account setting, but I don't think he shouldn't be pissed off by the company who was spamming him.

If I was hiring a recruiter, I would be hoping they could provide me with something more than an ability to spam developers.

It seems to me that most good developers would ignore such spam—I get so much of this noise that I pay it no attention whatsoever.

If this is the best recruiters can do, then they can apparently provide no real value to the process.

Thanks for typing this out.

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