Scraping is huge business for people who don’t have your best interests in mind, too. There are many businesses built on the idea of gathering as much of people’s data as they can find in the public internet and selling it to anyone willing to pay.
Contrary to what many people thing, Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data! They are ad companies that use their private data to target ads, but they aren’t selling it to 3rd parties likely many people have been led to believe. This has created a market opening for nefarious companies to scrape these websites, compile the data, and sell it to everyone from police to governments to spammers.
I’m not saying there’s a right answer to regulation, but it’s incorrect to say that scrapers are always the good actors championing the public’s best interests.
I haven't seen one in a while, but this sort of thing used to go off the rails on amazon. I tried to buy a 10 trillion dollar chair--presumably algorithmically priced--but the checkout process broke before I could see what the CC company would say about it.
Scraping them with high fidelity and frequency, and then selling that data commercially... and then buying that data from a provider and updating your prices using them...
Probably isn't something a company with potential monopoly concerns (read: Walmart et al.) would want be be overly open about.
And cameras are used by stalkers as well. But when a prolific photographer, growing rich off their trade, tries to control what others are allowed to photograph, I won't assume they're doing it out of concern for my well-being.
I don't want Google or Facebook to have my data either, yet they've done their best to gather everyone's with various trackers, not just data posted voluntarily to their platforms. They don't have to sell it - they are the threat too.
>Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data!
this does not excuse the pervasive tracking that occurs by "we collect for internal purposes only" vs "we sell to anyone". an invasion of privacy is still an invasion of privacy whether they do it for their own fetish purposes or distributing it to the public.
Contrary to what many people thing, Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data! They are ad companies that use their private data to target ads, but they aren’t selling it to 3rd parties likely many people have been led to believe. This has created a market opening for nefarious companies to scrape these websites, compile the data, and sell it to everyone from police to governments to spammers.
I’m not saying there’s a right answer to regulation, but it’s incorrect to say that scrapers are always the good actors championing the public’s best interests.