<story><title>The Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-15/the-brutal-fight-to-mine-your-data-and-sell-it-to-your-boss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>I think the two main questions raised in this case:&lt;p&gt;1. Is it always ok for someone to build a bot to do something which can be legally done by hand? Example: Building a LinkedIn scraper that tracks all public data. Or using a GPS tracker to track a car, instead of manually following it&lt;p&gt;2. Is it anti-competitive practice, and a violation of anti-trust laws, for LinkedIn to allow the general public, and other companies like Google, access to its public data, but ban others such as HiQ?&lt;p&gt;On question 1, I tend to lean towards LinkedIn&amp;#x27;s position. Just because something can be legally done by hand, shouldn&amp;#x27;t automatically mean that we should allow it to be done at massive scale by automated scripts. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want companies having the right to surveil the movements of every citizen 24&amp;#x2F;7, just because they have the right to follow someone on foot, and I think a similar argument can be made against HiQ.&lt;p&gt;On question 2 though, I agree with HiQ. LinkedIn&amp;#x27;s attempt to ban HiQ doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like an attempt to protect their users, but rather, an anti-competitive attempt to kill off a potential competitor, and secure the market for themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>&amp;gt; I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want companies having the right to surveil the movements of every citizen 24&amp;#x2F;7, just because they have the right to follow someone on foot&lt;p&gt;I feel like there&amp;#x27;s an inherent contradiction there, and the right thing to do isn&amp;#x27;t to &amp;quot;lean into&amp;quot; the contradiction, but rather to resolve it in the other direction. That is: we probably need to change what is legal for &lt;i&gt;private individuals&lt;/i&gt; to do, if we want to effect change in what is legal for automation to do.&lt;p&gt;After all, at its most basic, we&amp;#x27;ve got &amp;quot;automation&amp;quot; like Mechanical Turk, or people who you can hire to stand in a line for you to buy a new iPhone. Any law against automation won&amp;#x27;t work out if exceptions like that still exist; and those exceptions can&amp;#x27;t be stopped except by changing what deals it is legal for a human to make.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-15/the-brutal-fight-to-mine-your-data-and-sell-it-to-your-boss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>I think the two main questions raised in this case:&lt;p&gt;1. Is it always ok for someone to build a bot to do something which can be legally done by hand? Example: Building a LinkedIn scraper that tracks all public data. Or using a GPS tracker to track a car, instead of manually following it&lt;p&gt;2. Is it anti-competitive practice, and a violation of anti-trust laws, for LinkedIn to allow the general public, and other companies like Google, access to its public data, but ban others such as HiQ?&lt;p&gt;On question 1, I tend to lean towards LinkedIn&amp;#x27;s position. Just because something can be legally done by hand, shouldn&amp;#x27;t automatically mean that we should allow it to be done at massive scale by automated scripts. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t want companies having the right to surveil the movements of every citizen 24&amp;#x2F;7, just because they have the right to follow someone on foot, and I think a similar argument can be made against HiQ.&lt;p&gt;On question 2 though, I agree with HiQ. LinkedIn&amp;#x27;s attempt to ban HiQ doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like an attempt to protect their users, but rather, an anti-competitive attempt to kill off a potential competitor, and secure the market for themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;1. Is it always ok for someone to build a bot to do something which can be legally done by hand?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say no. Technology is a multiplier, and if the same thing that took painstaking work and devoting resources to be done manually can be done automatically, it can be the difference between a democracy and a police state.&lt;p&gt;(E.g. the police targeting some suspects by tailing them and have some people listen to their conversations, and everybody in the country monitored 24&amp;#x2F;7).&lt;p&gt;The kind of crappy arguments usually taken as OK in courts however see this otherwise, as if 1000x automated something is the same as 1x.</text></comment>