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The excessive scraping and ignoring robots.txt only breaks the informal social contract established over the past decades of the open internet. The real proble
by aorth 2mo ago
The excessive scraping and ignoring robots.txt only breaks the informal social contract established over the past decades of the open internet.
The real problem is the companies offering money to developers if they include unrelated SDKs in their calculator or flashlight (for example) applications. Those SDKs add functionality to incorporate those devices into a network that can be used for scraping. The traffic is little, but is distributed over millions of residential devices all over the world, making it difficult to categorize or block. That should be illegal, and that's what Google et al can be expected to be policing on their app stores.
- inigyou 2mo agoOn what grounds would it be illegal though? Things don't become illegal just because you don't like them. They may become illegal just because the president doesn't like them, but I don't think you're him, and in the absence of that, there has to be a majority of Congress and most of them want a reason.
- robinsonb5 2mo agoBecause they don't have the informed consent* of the owner of the device wich ends up running the code? * no, small print in a click-through agreement doesn't count.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's not illegal to run code on a device without informed consent to everything the code does. The CFAA may be excessively broad but it isn't that broad.
- TurdF3rguson 2mo agoI think they do actually. It's pretty clear from the consent screen that they're doing what they're doing.
- zeratax 2mo agoask any of the people who installed it if they understand what they're doing and especially what the consequences of that are. i doubt you could get a dozen people who do of the millions and millions who installed it.