throwwebmaster

In reply to your sibling comment: I actually agree with you in the anonymous case and point out that many of the examples named (including FB, the topic of discussion) require user authentication.

While I appreciate your nod to my writing (I have a mutual appreciation, I might add, for your Soliloquising), again, none of the data obtained was public.

The parties here would be the US FTC and FB, so no.

Interesting that you mentioned Twitter. Twitter requires a user account to access content. Try accessing Twitter while logged out.

The FTC is a US government entity.

Is it public though? For one thing, you need to have a registered user account and be part of the targeting audience as a winning biddee for ad placement in order to see the ads in question. As an ordinary person, unless you share your private login credentials with me (which would be another ToS violation), I cannot view nor access the ads you have been shown.

It will be interesting to see how the FTC will rectify its ongoing fight to hold FB more accountable for protecting its users’ private data with the FTC’s ostensibly contradictory position to allow mass scraping of private user data at scale in this case. Cambridge Analytica was doing roughly the exact same thing, which was precisely what motivated the FTC's involvement in the first place.

No.

According to many rulings the last few years, continually and systematically accessing a third party’s data under the clear expectation that you are aware of (as well as agreed to) their terms is definitely a meeting of minds.

This clear instance of reductio ad absurdum is wholly non-analogous. Factually inaccurate court proceeding depictions and legal misunderstandings aside, for one thing, the non-hypothetical defendant’s identity is well-known in this specific instance.

Less speculation and more facts:

https://www.upcounsel.com/are-website-terms-and-conditions-l...

This is heavily supported by Case Law.

As I stated before, Illegal or not, it is within the website owners’ rights to restrict access.

By accessing the data on a website, you are forming a contract with that website and are subject to the website’s terms and conditions.

As a website owner, beyond that, there is no need to tell someone they cannot access your site if you simply block them from accessing your servers instead using a multitude of techniques.

Where does caching come into play at all here? You cannot cache content to begin with if the server is blocking access in the first place. And if you have already cached it in the act of violating said website’s terms of service, then you are still not in compliance.

It’s within anyone’s rights as website maintainers to block malicious IP addresses that scrape or otherwise within their discretion.

Nobody is legally forcing websites to allow access to everyone, and accordingly, nobody is altering the law by blocking access to people (crawlers, hackers, spammers, malcontents, or anybody really) that they feel are not welcome. So exercising one’s existing rights isn’t an act of making or altering laws.

I suggest reading up on what robots.txt is to further understand this.

Don’t most websites prohibit someone from scraping and harvesting the data on them? Most recently, I can think of Yelp, Amazon, and GitHub prohibiting this, as well as the Aaron Swartz case.