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Comment by imathrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, we've seen a lot of governing bodies _now_ start scraping to fight scam sites and "fake" sites, so there's a lot of legitimate use-cases popping up. It's not necessarily just about gathering e-commerce data or backfilling lack of an API anymore.

Source: Founder@browserless.io

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I know this is slightly off topic, but I have to ask: Why not create a new account rather than use the same self-described throwaway account you used to ask about raising prices (for browserless?)[1]? For what it's worth, I initially assumed you likely weren't legitimate and didn't engage, so if you want to keep contributing to threads as yourself you might want to consider using a new/different username.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271224

So how will you ensure your service is only used for "good"?

no services remain "good" so why ask the question. it gets ignored or answered but then a decade or two down the line the philosophy gets scrapped, a story as old as time.

I still don't understand why Google publicly removed "Do No Evil" from their company. It's one thing to not follow it but to actively remove it feels weird. Like they wanted to say "HEY Y'ALL GET READY FOR EVIL!"

You can go to https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/ and ctrl+f "evil", and you'll see it's still there.

Can confirm this Google document contains the word "evil."

Interesting I remember a bunch of articles and stuff talking about them removing the do no evil bit. Guess I didn't do enough research. Appreciate the correction!

Same way the cooking-knives company ensures those are only used for cooking.

the problem isn't scraping, the problem is the "content" that is being "created".

A site I worked on changed our captcha, and in the 24 hours after, we had a 90% reduction in new accounts. We had a full API including webhooks, the only private data was on the account page, there was no reason to scrape, but even if you did, there was no reason to be logged in... these accounts were used to harass, intimidate and scam legitimate users.

I fail to see any legitimate use case for getting around protections that web dm developers put in to help prevent this.

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