Fair Game: data scraping is an underacknowledged privacy concern | Hacker News Reader

Fair Game: data scraping is an underacknowledged privacy concern

reallifemag.com

30 pointscratermoon9 comments

Different resource usage patterns aside, why do people think that robots are somehow less "legitimate" consumers of data than their human operators? Do the authors of this article think that humans only use data for purposes sanctioned by its producers?

I think the world would be a much better place if we stopped treating programmatic access to interfaces differently than human access to it. Anybody can learn to code.

> Do the authors of this article think that humans only use data for purposes sanctioned by its producers?

That's the unfortunate direction copyright law is moving in. In the EU, "data mining" is considered a right separate from mere access, and the carve-outs for allowing it without permission from the data owner are very limited:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/text-and-data-mining-e...

From the story: "Scraping is related to but distinct from “web crawling,” which Google and Archive.org, for example, use to gather the contents of web pages ...

Implicit in the basic idea of scraping is that data is being put into a different form and then turned to different uses from the ones that user or a site’s administrator intends."

I don't know if the author believes Google's efforts don't include scraping by that definition, or if he just didn't further mention Google for some reason.

If I search for a random fact, Google will show me data from a random unfortunate website, saving me from a click.

That is how Google provably scrapes sites in addition to crawling them.

It's almost like the SCOTUS didn't just rule on this, as far as some people seem to be aware.

Was there a recent SCOTUS ruling on web scraping?

An important case on scraping reached the SCOTUS, they ruled on a narrow aspect of that case, then sent it back to the Ninth Circuit. Unless someone finds a lot more meat to litigate, I think the legal books are effectively closed on scraping.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

Thanks for the link!

I believe OP does not realize how machines talking to machines (in this case: reading from machines) is a central part of our future. It's not only malic. actors as mostly put in the article. We missed making the internet structured so reading the web with machines in the way we will go about it. It's unavoidable and will lead to good outcomes. For sure it's annoying for site owners seeing bots go crazy (3k req/m) but does it matter if a machine picks up my random thought I should have not posted to the internet in the first place or a person?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com