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This is interesting - instead of suing under the idea that scraping itself is wrong (courts have ruled that public information that you can get on websites can
by stanrivers 6y ago
This is interesting - instead of suing under the idea that scraping itself is wrong (courts have ruled that public information that you can get on websites can be scraped... I think it is something like 50%+ of web traffic in the U.S. is bot traffic), they are suggesting that scraping through a logged-in account is somehow different.
If the user of the account consents to have the plugin installed on their computer and is made aware that the plugin will scrap this data, you could argue that there is nothing wrong here.
However, people post on Facebook under the idea that the information they share will only be viewable by their friend group (or as dictated by their privacy settings).
That's where this gets interesting... does the friend group of the person with the plugin have any rights to privacy that dictate what the person with the plugin can do with their data?
If I take a picture of a newsfeed, for example, that has information my friends have posted, and share that somehow - am I violating their privacy legally?
If not, how is this different?
Will be interesting to follow this one.
- frenchyatwork 6y agoThis is also interesting, because people (mostly my friends) also use Facebook as a tool to share pictures and other PII about me without my consent. In that regard, I don't know if there's a clear difference between Facebook and these extensions.
- devit 6y agoPretty sure that either the user is not aware at all of the scraping, or anyway the scraping is not done in the user's interest and the user is not in a position to fully understand the implications, so it is a clearly malicious operation. In other words, they are abusing the user's trust to access the user's private data for their own profit, hence defrauding the user, and engaging in unauthorized access to the data shared between the user and Facebook without either party's full informed consent.
- colinmhayes 6y agoI don't think facebook is serving ads in the users interest and the user doesn't understand the implications either. The user has to understand that there's no free lunch.
- philjohn 6y agoIt's a GDPR lawsuit waiting to happen, no?