> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point.
If it's auth-gated, it needs to be, well, authenticated.
The person who provides that, and the subsequent automated scraping, is the party, and would be the recipient of a civil suit.
AFAIK, there isn't an single auth scheme on earth that guarantee human intervention[1]. Anyone can set-up a robot creating new users on a whim using single-use email addresses and even phone numbers. In fact, we know that OpenAI's agent have been doing exactly that when attacking Rubygem. And all AI labs are likely doing it for scrapping social media as well.
Who are you gonna sue then?
[1] the closest thing is Altman iris scanning venture, but without a broad adoption it's remains functionally useless.
> No different from "if I roll a car down a hill and it hits something at the bottom, how can you hold the car liable?"
That's the difference between criminal and civil justice. You don't need to sign a law for it to bind you, but for contracts you do.
But terms of service are contracts which you sign by agreeing.
Courts have looked somewhat favorably on "I didn't read that" defenses, but accepting the agreement is a legal contract between you and the service provider.
The authentication mechanisms used by websites don't have a specific legal power, it's just a POST request among other GET requests sent during scraping. And we have jurisprudence saying scrapping is legal no matter what the ToS of the website says, because the scraping entity never signed up the contract.
The only protection against scrapping that auth is giving you isn't a legal one, it's a technical one (you can detect and ban the scraping user account).
Patently false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
> Who are you gonna sue then?
The person who set up the robot.
If that was true, then all scraping of a website with a ToS would be illegal, yet it's established by jurisprudence that it's not. And “authentication” doesn't change the picture here in Amy way, because it's not actually authentication.
Because terms of service require both parties to accept!
If I hold a contract outside your window and scream "you accept this contract" it doesn't bind you simply by looking out the window.
as I recall it was the large number of bot accounts not scraping but commenting.
A company can make their produce suck, on purpose (out of malice), because it fits their bottom line better (at least, in the short term) vs. a better UX.
OP may simply be asking companies to put their customers ahead of their (short-term) profit.
Reddit is another great example of this, where users have been looking for workarounds to their (increasingly more) hostile login wall since they started pressuring people to use their app years ago.
EDIT in which I clumsily express my weariness at hearing some of the smartest people in the world claim they “didn’t know” because they have arbitrated foolishness against liability
A business is free to choose that you must login to access their content and you are free to choose not to do business with them if you don't like it. I generally chose the latter
It's all about getting people locked into walled gardens. I wish the EU DMA had taken a harder stance on this and required all social media to federate to some extent.
Either way, I don’t care. The Internet has become so hostile to users that the only moral and rational choice is to not participate on platforms that have become so hostile that threatening legal action is the only way that they can protect their relevancy in facilitating social discourse.
Sometimes the objectives align, but not always. And yes, the world would be a better place if they were better aligned, but we don't live in that world.
I'm sure X's motivation is something along the lines of forcing logins creates more users, or the downside of scraping outweighs the benefits.
Will it work? Probably not. But not even trying would be self-defeating.
If your argument doesn't even seem aware of them, then they won't listen.
I guess you could say "who cares, X is evil anyway, might as well try" but it just seems ineffective and frankly a little naive.
Google, Facebook, X are all explicitly designed to be addictive and provide as little value as possible. Because they want to give everything away for free in a way that keeps you on the site to maximise scraping your data so they can screw you over more later.
They are not even aligned at the most basic level. Everyone needs to stop using it. Or at least circumvent their measures.