<story><title>Taking action against scraping for hire</title><url>https://about.fb.com/news/2022/07/actions-against-scraping-for-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mateuszbuda</author><text>In general I agree that harvesting &lt;i&gt;public&lt;/i&gt; data is moral.
I think that in these particular cases it&amp;#x27;s:
1) extracting data from profiles that opted for not being public (only available to logged in users) and
2) reposting scraped data (publicly?) as belonging to the guy who scraped it without users consent.</text></item><item><author>HeckFeck</author><text>Data harvesting is moral for me, but not for thee.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kordlessagain</author><text>Facebook has hidden much of Instagram&amp;#x27;s content behind logins, so that makes most of it &amp;quot;not public&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I don&amp;#x27;t think all of Instagram&amp;#x27;s users care if their images are hidden, or not.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s quite unfortunate Facebook&amp;#x2F;Meta is using hostile language and the word &amp;quot;scraping&amp;quot; together in this case. Scraping is a legitimate process used by various business models to gather information from the Web, which itself was originally intended to be an open forum for people to share content.&lt;p&gt;Hostile business models have corrupted that intent and turned it into a competitive environment that is harming users and legitimate models which may not have the funding larger corporations can muster.&lt;p&gt;I have a &amp;quot;scraper&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;ve built that will either snapshot a page from a user&amp;#x27;s browser or crawl it remotely with Selinium&amp;#x2F;Firefox, on the user&amp;#x27;s behalf, to save the content in an index for searching later, by that user. It&amp;#x27;s not automated, nor does it parse and crawl URLs in the pages saved. It doesn&amp;#x27;t use page content in a wider context, either.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve spent a significant amount of time trying to &amp;quot;work around&amp;quot; anti-scraping efforts by various companies and it&amp;#x27;s frustrating to see hostility instead of cooperation in certain types of use.</text></comment>
<story><title>Taking action against scraping for hire</title><url>https://about.fb.com/news/2022/07/actions-against-scraping-for-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mateuszbuda</author><text>In general I agree that harvesting &lt;i&gt;public&lt;/i&gt; data is moral.
I think that in these particular cases it&amp;#x27;s:
1) extracting data from profiles that opted for not being public (only available to logged in users) and
2) reposting scraped data (publicly?) as belonging to the guy who scraped it without users consent.</text></item><item><author>HeckFeck</author><text>Data harvesting is moral for me, but not for thee.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slightwinder</author><text>From the article, it seems to be service for scrapping data you have access anyway. As long as they only handle those data to the requesting customer, whose login they used, I don&amp;#x27;t see a difference between general public, and this users personalized &amp;quot;public&amp;quot;. If access is still limited to the people who have the access-rights, then I don&amp;#x27;t see a difference between accessing through the official interface, or via scrapped data.</text></comment>