Hacker News Reader

Ok, you’re building a service that scrapes e.g., property rental websites to find entries that are trying to scam naive renters.

The property websites are incompetent to solve the problem, or don’t care, but either way they sure don’t want you scraping their valuable data.

Is it still unethical?

View on HN

That just makes both of you wrong.

Agreed. It's kind of like when a non-profit organization argues that they are entitled to someone's data because "we're not making a profit off of it." That's ridiculous.

Try asking a startup for free software licenses or seats or whatever as a non-profit. "We're entitled to 40 seats of your SAAS solution because we're a non-profit working to solve world peace." It's definitely within the startup's pervue to respond with a no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com