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Ask HN: Is it unethical to sell scraped 'people data'?
Consider hCard on Web pages as a source. Would it be unethical to scrape and sell the data people put out there?
What about email addresses? I'm curious about how people feel.
- Travis 17y agoYes, I think it's unethical. First, the data belongs to me, and I'm allowing a specific site to use it -- not you. Even for sites that claim they own my data, it still doesn't give you any rights to it. Further, it is likely a violation of the ToS of a site if you're doing that.
- Alex3917 17y agoThe people have their information online for people to contact them. If you want to scrape the data and contact some of them then that's fine, as long as the email you send to each individual is personal and relevant. Doing anything else with the data is unethical, because that's not what they've signed up for.
- jfarmer 17y agoYou've just uncovered Rapleaf's business model.
- gtani 17y agoConsider the Netflix and AOL search data, where people could (maybe) be identfied from "anonymized" data. Or the facebook gaydar thing. http://33bits.org/2008/09/30/law-review-article-about-netflix-paper/ http://33bits.org/2008/09/30/law-review-article-about-netfli... harvesting emails, that is an established business model called...