Harvesters are in a sort of legal grey area, from what I can tell. If the information is publicly available, then why shouldn't anyone be allowed to access it,

Harvesters are in a sort of legal grey area, from what I can tell. If the information is publicly available, then why shouldn't anyone be allowed to access it, or use technology to automate access? I'm sure that Google has millions of email addresses from crawling sites alone. Of course there are more obvious methods that are clearly illegal, and I agree that the governments should enforce the laws more actively.