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That doesn't look like Foursquare has handed that over. What's the legality of scraping a service for their data in this way?
by nicholassmith 13y ago
That doesn't look like Foursquare has handed that over. What's the legality of scraping a service for their data in this way?
- onedev 13y agoThat doesn't look completely legal to me either.
- joshu 13y agothen re-releasing it with distribution terms is probably not legal at all.
- ozh 13y agoI don't get why scraping publicly and freely accessible data would be illegal. The redistribution under their own terms is another matter, though.
- chimeracoder 13y ago> publicly and freely accessible data would be illegal. Data is not "publicly and freely accessible" if accessing it requires you to agree to separate terms of service for it that restrict your ability to access and redistribute it. (Whether or not one believes the data should be freely and public accessible is a separate matter, but given the above, it's hard to make the case that it is). Amusingly, this data still isn't "freely accessible", because these people have attached their own, separate terms to reusing and redistributing the data.
- mvanvoorden 13y agoIf you have to apply to specific terms, but are able to access everything without complying to these terms, this effectively means that the data is publicly and freely accessible. Rules on itself don't restrict anything, enforcement does.
- jorgeortiz85 13y agoI'm a Foursquare engineer. We have explanations of our API policies here: https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/community https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/community We'll be contacting this researcher to ask where they got this data and whether it conforms to our policies.
- nicholassmith 13y agoThanks for responding, I didn't realise Foursquare actually gave so much of their data away freely. Which makes it slightly more seedy someone has scraped the rest and dumped it online.