HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-15) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The Brutal Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss
135 points by artsandsci
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-15/the-brutal-fi...___________________________________________________________________
megamindbrian2 - 3 hours ago
This is stupid. While my boss has vested interest in my data, I am
the only one that can benefit or change because of it.
dsp1234 - 2 hours ago
If your employer knows you are looking for other opportunities,
they could stop giving you projects and start transitioning you
before you are ready, or just fire you.That's a benefit to the
employer, that probably is not a benefit to you, since you would
likely want to quit on your own terms.Another quick example is
knowing that your employees are researching how to unionize, and
thus knowing to bring in anti-union resources.I'm sure there are
more.
mjcl - 1 hours ago
Or even create a self-fulfilling prophecy. What if someone is
listed as "may leave" when they have no intent to do so. If the
employer then starts freezing the employee out, that could lead
the the employee eventually leaving, even if they didn't
originally want to.
kevin_b_er - 2 hours ago
The goal is to figure out if you're close to quitting so you can
be preemptively fired. This hands the final key away: That while
the corporation without notice or reason could fire you, you
could always show the same lack of loyalty and quit without
notice. The goal is to deny the human that small balance.
whack - 2 hours ago
I think the two main questions raised in this case:1. Is it always
ok for someone to build a bot to do something which can be legally
done by hand? Example: Building a LinkedIn scraper that tracks all
public data. Or using a GPS tracker to track a car, instead of
manually following it2. Is it anti-competitive practice, and a
violation of anti-trust laws, for LinkedIn to allow the general
public, and other companies like Google, access to its public data,
but ban others such as HiQ?On question 1, I tend to lean towards
LinkedIn's position. Just because something can be legally done by
hand, shouldn't automatically mean that we should allow it to be
done at massive scale by automated scripts. I wouldn't want
companies having the right to surveil the movements of every
citizen 24/7, just because they have the right to follow someone on
foot, and I think a similar argument can be made against HiQ.On
question 2 though, I agree with HiQ. LinkedIn's attempt to ban HiQ
doesn't seem like an attempt to protect their users, but rather, an
anti-competitive attempt to kill off a potential competitor, and
secure the market for themselves.
leggomylibro - 2 hours ago
>Is it always ok for someone to build a bot to do something which
can be legally done by hand?Funny that you put it that way; when
computers were in their infancy, people would scoff along the
lines of, "...and they spent all that money/time teaching the
damned thing to do something that you could get anyone off the
street to do for $0.50/hr..."Of course, before computers were
invented in the first place 'computer' was a job description for
a person who computes. How things change in...what, 50-80 years?
derefr - 2 hours ago
> I wouldn't want companies having the right to surveil the
movements of every citizen 24/7, just because they have the right
to follow someone on footI feel like there's an inherent
contradiction there, and the right thing to do isn't to "lean
into" the contradiction, but rather to resolve it in the other
direction. That is: we probably need to change what is legal for
private individuals to do, if we want to effect change in what is
legal for automation to do.After all, at its most basic, we've
got "automation" like Mechanical Turk, or people who you can hire
to stand in a line for you to buy a new iPhone. Any law against
automation won't work out if exceptions like that still exist;
and those exceptions can't be stopped except by changing what
deals it is legal for a human to make.
coldtea - 1 hours ago
>I feel like there's an inherent contradiction there, and the
right thing to do isn't to "lean into" the contradiction, but
rather to resolve it in the other direction. That is: we
probably need to change what is legal for private individuals
to do, if we want to effect change in what is legal for
automation to do.It can't be solved this way, because
somethings can not be made illegal or if they can, they cannot
be enforced at the individual doing it manually level.Some
individual can always sit at a street corner and read the
license plates of the cars that pass. How one can make that
illegal?But systematically mass-collecting such data could
easily be made illegal.>After all, at its most basic, we've got
"automation" like Mechanical Turk, or people who you can hire
to stand in a line for you to buy a new iPhone.That still has
costs and limitations -- so it's nowhere near any competition
for automation.I'd say making their automated version illegal
is a good starting point.
derefr - 1 hours ago
> Some individual can always sit at a street corner and read
the license plates of the cars that pass. How one can make
that illegal?Have you heard of conspiracy laws?We
disincentivize gangs from using drug mules, by making it hard
for them to find willing drug mules, by making it illegal to
be a willing drug mule?the drug mule will, if they were
complicit in the act, be charged with conspiracy to commit a
felony.This (apparently) works to decrease the prevalence of
drug-muling, even though it's very hard to detect drug mules
(which is the whole point of drug mules.) The law only really
gets applied when you end up finding a mule through some
other investigation (i.e. busting the gang itself.) But that
still happens often enough to scare all the other potential
willing drug mules.This is how I'd see individuals sitting on
street-corners counting license plates being charged: not for
doing anything that is illegal prima facie, but rather for
their willing complicity in a conspiracy to commit the novel
crime of, say, building a database through
espionage/surveillance without a license.In other words: if
the company's business model is based on a crime, then
they're a criminal organization; and it's illegal to profit
from dealings with a criminal organization, so you're doing
something illegal by doing what they say, even if the thing
they're asking you to do isn't illegal.
coldtea - 1 hours ago
>1. Is it always ok for someone to build a bot to do something
which can be legally done by hand?I'd say no. Technology is a
multiplier, and if the same thing that took painstaking work and
devoting resources to be done manually can be done automatically,
it can be the difference between a democracy and a police
state.(E.g. the police targeting some suspects by tailing them
and have some people listen to their conversations, and everybody
in the country monitored 24/7).The kind of crappy arguments
usually taken as OK in courts however see this otherwise, as if
1000x automated something is the same as 1x.
pishpash - 1 hours ago
Yes, the two questions are in fact quite orthogonal.- Should data
truly intended to be public be scrapable by HiQ (or anyone)? The
answer has to be yes.- Should you be able to use "public" data to
seek out essentially private information behind the user's back
(like what HiQ is doing)? The answer has to be no.On this latter
question, there is a notion of continuous consent and
discoverability. There should be a feedback trail all the way
back to the original provider of data (the user) about who is
accessing the data and for what purpose, even if (or especially
because) it is public; and this fact should be made known to the
accessor.There has to be a semblance of symmetry in how a public
exchange of information should take place. Both the provider and
the accessor should be in the open if it is truly public. Then
the user can take actions to affirmatively provide continuous
consent or withdraw.
lovich - 2 hours ago
Haven't the courts already decided that if things can be done by
hand then they can be automated? For example license plate
scanners were ruled legal because officers can view that
information in public, but the automation allows the police to
follow everyones movements with only a few machines set up. This
ship has sailed
matt4077 - 1 hours ago
Automated license plate scanning is probably legal for local
municipalities (Neil v Fairfax County, SC appeal pending).That
doesn't mean it's legal for private entities to do so, nor is
necessarily legal for such data to be, for example, aggregated
nation-wide.See
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/mass-su...
for Conor Friedersdorf's article which is attributed with
bringing down the last attempt for a "Homeland Security"
database of where you were last summer.
mjevans - 10 minutes ago
The correct solution for this concern is to make it legal to
obscure the IDENTIFYING part of the license plates (but
require that state and 'tabs' are still exposed) while it is
parked.Moving the obscurity would constitute modification of
private property and should require either a valid documented
probable cause or a warrant for the search.
epicide - 2 hours ago
You're probably correct in how it will turn out, but laws can
change. One precedent does not mean nothing will ever break it.
It does make it harder, though.
mtgx - 2 hours ago
On the other hand the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that "just
because law enforcement can follow someone manually" doesn't
mean it can also put a GPS tracker on whoever it wants, without
a warrant.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-gps
/supreme-co...I think we as the society are ultimately
responsible for setting certain "rights" in stone. For
instance, should the government be able to record everything
anyone says "in a public place", even while on the phone or
having a "private conversation" (but in public) with a friend,
through highly advanced CCTV cameras?Sure you could argue that
"because it's a public place, then yes, we can conclude that
the government should be allowed to do that". But that doesn't
necessarily have to end the discussion. We, the society, can
decide that "HELL NO, that's not acceptable, and we'll put
anyone who tries to do that in prison."
dalbasal - 53 minutes ago
Well... 2 could easily be both, or even just what linkedin said.
If HR gets an alert when you start sniffing around for new
opportunities, people will sniff elsewhere. Linkedin don't want
that and (coincidentally) neither do users. Either way, I don't
think it's the interesting question.On question 1, I think you
are really on the money. Concise.We're used to thinking in terms
of principles when it comes to our principles, especially laws.
Realistically though, our moral codes are not like physics.
They're approximations that seem to work for the most part, for
the situations we know about. Being a somewhat anal retentive
species, we don't generally like this. It feels like the
principles are unsound.
irrational - 2 hours ago
I am so thankful I don't have a LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. account to
mine for data.
psychometry - 2 hours ago
I assure you that Facebook knows all about you whether you have
an account or not.
tjoff - 1 hours ago
Highly doubtful has any idea of even gender and age. They have
a broad idea of localization and perhaps a pretty laughable
attempt at "interests". Absolutely guaranteed to be nothing of
value though.
sumedh - 38 minutes ago
> Highly doubtful has any idea of even gender and age.That
depends if they know that you visit websites which are also
visited a lot by other males between the age group of 20 to
30, then they can almost assume that you are a male between
20 - 30.
tjoff - 25 minutes ago
Big woop, what are they going to do with that information?
They can "target" me with an ad meant for males in their
20-30s (which again, is just a very crude guess). Which
will guaranteed to be a much worse fit than just targeting
to the content of that site.No tracking needed. Much better
accuracy and return.
fenwick67 - 1 hours ago
Well, maybe not all about you, but they have a good guess.
irrational - 14 minutes ago
How do they get that information? My family and friends don't
really use it much (and to the best of my knowledge I've never
been written about or been in any photographs that have been
posted). I use things like Ghostery, noscript, ad block, etc.
to keep tracking to a minimum. I don't search Google directly
but only through duckduckgo. I'd be interested in hearing what
other means they have of finding out information about me so I
can block those as well if possible.
willitpamp573 - 1 hours ago
But you're missing out on all the valuable Services they
provide!!! /s
21 - 30 minutes ago
In a few years not having a meaningful Facebook profile might be
suspicious in itself.
Raphmedia - 1 hours ago
Since they can fingerprint your web travels to every page that
has Google Analytics or a share widget, there's no need for you
to create an account.
irrational - 19 minutes ago
I use Ghostery and noscript and an ad blocker, so hopefully
there isn't too much of that happening.
giantsloth - 52 minutes ago
I'm going to posit that most of us are spoiled by how much
attention we get from recruiters, which is why the attention on
this article seems to be on the legality of scraping someones site
are not.The focus should be on how disturbing it is that a company
is using metrics like "independence from employer brand" to take
the power out of the hands of the worker and put it into the hands
of the corporation who already wields so much power and influence
over our society.Programmers are lucky, a last bastion of decent
treatment by corporations. Companies like HiQ are looking to tip
the scale back in favor of the corporation, run by people like Mark
Weidick who want to be a useful and well kept pet and identify as a
"Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Hollywood wanna-be." (twitter)I fear
secretive preemptive firing and hiring. "Talks" from your manager,
based on encroachments into your private internet browser. This
will force developers to combine their personal identity with their
corporate identity (which far too many developers do already
wearing their respective companies t-shirt like a big walking free
advertisement) and curate their online life to reflect how grateful
they are to the lords of their fiefdom.
QAPereo - 12 minutes ago
Give it time, and Snow Crash is going to look like a utopian
vision.
acover - 29 minutes ago
The neural network said so
CalChris - 2 hours ago
This approach strikes me as confusing precision for accuracy. It is
possible to use this sort of information to formulate an extremely
precise model. That apparent precision becomes believable because
... it's precise and complex and uses a lot of data. That then
becomes a salable product.However, whether this all is actionable
and accurate is another and unfortunately later question. The
promoters and customers of that approach might want to read this
chapter in the CIA's Psychology of Intelligence Analysis:Chapter 5:
Do You Really Need More Information?https://www.cia.gov/library
/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...But then they might not have a
product to sell or buy.
alanfalcon - 2 hours ago
I dunno, I was accutely aware that as I prepared to find a new
job by updating my resume, updating my LinkedIn profile and
contact list for the first time in years, etc., that it would be
very obvious to anyone watching what I was doing. I correctly
assumed my employer wasn?t watching (which would have made things
potentially uncomfortable for me), but with tools like this it
becomes so low effort to watch for this stuff that they can
afford to do it.No, not everyone is like me and ignores LinkedIn
while actively and happily employed, but I imagine enough people
are and that it?s not so hard to build models of other user types
that work as advertised (as long as they have access to the
public data).HiQ is a threat to LinkedIn on two fronts: as a
direct competitor and as a reason for some people to opt out of
using the service (though it appears LinkedIn offers similar
services, so perhaps the threat is more the Streisand effect at
work). That doesn?t mean HiQ should be locked out of the data of
course, but it makes for an interesting and complicated
situation.
CalChris - 2 hours ago
I'm not saying that social media doesn't exist and that
anything you say can't and won't be used against you in a court
of law. It will be. What I am saying is that relying on a
complex model based on this is just rank silliness. Still, I
guarantee that that rank silliness will be a product, it will
be sold and and it will be bought.For a big market with small
bets (ads) this makes sense. For a small market with big bets
(employment) it doesn?t make sense, to me at least.
21 - 33 minutes ago
I think you make the mistake of not thinking in statistics.It
doesn't matter if it's not always right, it only matters if
it's better than what they have at the moment (ie: almost
nothing).Like the quoted bank said in the article, improving
retention by 1% can lower costs by 100 mil per year. Offering
a raise to people polishing their Linked in page sounds like
low hanging fruit to me.And of course, employees will try to
game the system, which will become smarter and so on.
CalChris - 9 minutes ago
A statistician went duck hunting. His first shot was a foot
high. His second shot was a foot low. When asked about it
he said, On average, that's a dead duck.As I said, there
are markets, large markets like ad auctions, where this
approach makes sense. But for HR, I'd have to see this
being a demonstrable success story before I'd touch it. I
think there are better and easier approaches to retention
like treating your employees well rather than looking at a
statistics dashboard and following its sage if soul-less
advice.
makr17 - 49 minutes ago
A former coworker has a theory that you can accurately assess
corporate morale by monitoring the volume of http requests to
linkedin over time...
atmosphereiv - 19 minutes ago
Well now it is time to delete my LinkedIn account. There terms and
services say that would not allow people to steal my information
and that my information is my own. I have never agreed for my info
to be resold by HiQ. Now that it is illegal for LinkedIn to protect
me from HiQ's theft the only option I have is to drop LinkedIn.
default-kramer - 1 hours ago
You know, I think LinkedIn actually has a point that blocking
certain scrapers is in the interest of their users' privacy. Of
course, they are really just trying to stifle a competitor (glad
the judge called them out on it) but I still think they should have
a right to block scrapers at will.
wfo - 2 hours ago
The poignant part of the headline here is "sell it to your boss". I
think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is
happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is
really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the
entire Internet.The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive
massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be
capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its
underlings. This is why I am far more concerned (as a selfish
American, thinking for now only about the concerns of Americans)
about the FBI having unlimited surveillance powers than the NSA:
the FBI has a history of committing crime, horrifying suppression
of speech, dissents, political movements, of destroying the lives
of innocents, etc. The FBI can knock on your door with guns and
throw in you a cage for decades. It has massive power over us so it
is important we do not give it massive information about us at the
same time.The same is true with bosses. One technique to deal with
this is to try and firewall the information off away from the
powerful. This is what we did to the FBI before parallel
construction (bills that say data will be collected "only for
terrorism" -- a lie, obviously, as it always is, but one that made
the collection palatable). The article focuses on this approach,
which is in my view a lost cause, but a lost cause worth fighting
for nonetheless.The other approach is to take away power from
bosses. Right now a boss has complete and total power over his
employees without labor unions or worker protections (i.e. the
current state of affairs in the US). It is this combination with
the information that is so disgusting and dystopian. So we could,
instead, talk about taking away the power, rather than taking away
the information -- which would have the added benefit of solving
many other social problems along the way.
oldandtired - 36 minutes ago
As a non-USAian, I would suggest that USAians take the approach
of referring to the FBI and its ilk as the Gestapo, KGB or the
Stasi (or any other well known like group). Keep the references
up and you might just see some changes.It's possible it won't
make changes but, hey, ya neva no wot can appen.
mjevans - 33 minutes ago
Enabling the average worker to take risks like searching for a
better job or maybe even starting a company of their own (if they
can argue the business model to a funding entity or have
sufficient savings or grant incentives) is the proper way of
defusing that power.Everyone should have access to quality
healthcare (as a birth/emigration right); tax everyone, single
payer (the government) negotiates with doctors in an area for the
best price; everyone that needs a service done picks from among
the open local doctors and just gets treated. No secondary
bills, no annoying billing department, just treatment.Second
would be to actually have a national ID, and among other things,
to have (an abstracted) public shipping address for registered
mail to reach that person. First Class (normal post) would be
able to lookup the address as part of the service. Anyone could
thus mail to #NATIONALID# and not need to worry about where
someone has moved or re-located.Third is enforcing market
competition for basic supplies (of all kinds, but I'll focus on
housing since that's a major concern on HN). This would mean
that if there isn't enough housing in an area people want to be,
more would be encouraged, and if that isn't enough to match
demand special arrangements would be called for to do things like
buy out whole neighborhoods (at once) at something like 2-5 times
current market value per unit and re-develop an area to a
correctly targeted density.
alexandercrohde - 1 hours ago
What do you mean lost? I deleted my linked in over a year ago
when I learned about them selling my data to recruiters and it
being used to assess my likelihood of leaving a job.
luxuryballs - 57 minutes ago
a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act
on behalf of the company, and that's the proper power you should
have when you need to run a company, clearly having employees be
able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the
employer wouldn't be idealyou could end up with job seekers that
are just seeding for predatory lawsuits, or people end up
squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of
what cost/value impact they are having on the company, terrible
for both businesses and competitive job seekers alikeeven if they
made a law that says "you can't fire people for things discovered
using data mining" you now run into the situation of having to
provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy
situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or
reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone, it would
make it dangerous to work with anyone that showed any potential
risk for making things difficult, and we don't want to make it
more risky and expensive for people to get jobs
wfo - 21 minutes ago
>a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to
act on behalf of the companyThis is obviously untrue. You can
be fired for any reason, anytime. Whether what you're doing is
at work or not. Your boss can see you at a protest and fire
you. Your boss can call you at 2am on your personal line and
fire you if you don't pick up the phone. Your boss can fire you
for not liking the right music or restaurants, or for refusing
to go to certain parties (it's just not a good culture fit).>
clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create
a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be idealNo, it
wouldn't be ideal, but it would be very, very good. Asking for
something ideal is a little Utopian, so I'll take the massive
improvement you are suggesting.>people end up squatting on a
company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value
impact they are having on the companyYou have just described
most bosses and corporate owners.>you now run into the
situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone,
which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to
provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with
someoneThis is how it works in nearly every developed country
in the world, and how it used to work in the US. It works just
fine. There is no need to give bosses ultimate complete power
over all aspects of their employee's lives. There is no
reasonable justification for it I have ever seen except
ideological devotion to the unquestioned authority and power of
the wealthy.
gaius - 1 hours ago
The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive
surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious,
malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings.I am not
so worried about that as I am about the cost. Consider: You could
always get the dirt on someone if you were willing to drop a few
grand on a private dick. That created a bit of friction - you had
to really want to get at that person. But what if you can get all
the dirt you could ever use for just $1, or some trivial cost?
Someone so inclined could go on a fishing expedition on a whim.
Your HR department could routinely do everyone in the company,
and every supplier and customer, because why not? That's the way
this will be weaponized.
Crontab - 23 minutes ago
Corporate surveillance is, in my life, a bigger deal than
government surveillance.I think Zeynep Tufekci described the
situation really well with the title of her recent Ted Talk:
"We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads".
sophacles - 5 minutes ago
I don't think it makes sense to separate those two... if that
data is collected by a third party and made available for sale,
the government can buy it too.
elhudy - 44 minutes ago
An approach we can take on an individual level is to be mindful
of the data we are giving up. If you are employed and in the
process of job hunting, then stop "liking" the article headlined
"10 Reasons why you deserve better from your company".
wfo - 32 minutes ago
This is giving in to surveillance: allowing it to define what
you are allowed to say and do.It is also not feasible. Sure,
you can stop doing that, but there are millions of other
'tells' that you will give up through your actions online that
can predict this information. Machine learning will pick up
features you cannot control or even imagine that will
accurately predict whether or not you are on the job hunt, no
matter what you do to hide it short of just disconnecting from
the Internet. Which is likely a tell itself.
SCHiM - 1 hours ago
I see many people argue that fighting for privacy is a lost
cause. That it'd take too much effort to reverse current trends.I
think that you and others are too cynical, although I agree that
it might become worse before it gets any better. If we look at
history we can see that other societies had the will, if not the
means, to engage in data mining on the scale that ours does
through the internet and massive analysis through machine
learning/statistics. The Stasi is an example of an organization
that certainly displayed the will to violate privacy as much as
possible.But it also becomes apparent that the privacy violating
priorities of those organizations and societies can change, in an
almost Hegelian dialectic manner, to protecting privacy. These
days counter culture is still going strong in Germany, relative
to other parts of Europe. People that belong to a counter culture
will resist tools that exert control over them, such as extensive
surveillance, by definition. This is in addition to the fact that
Germany is more privacy friendly than most of it's European
neighbours.Things can and do change over time. Through history a
pendulum swings from one extreme to another. We just need to wait
until something goes horrendously wrong with the way our privacy
is currently being violated before it starts to swing in the
other direction.
Retric - 1 hours ago
I think privacy feelings are often misplaced. Using the
internet may feel private, but it's like setting up a giant
antenna on your roof and using radio to chat with someone
else.IMO, the fight should focus on things like secretly
turning on the microphone on your internet connected device
(cellphone etc) and listing in. That's the kind of situation
where we could get useful long term precedent and most people
would agree with the intent.Because, if we are not careful that
can quietly change and AI will make listing to every
conversation anyone has in the county a real possibility.
knz - 7 minutes ago
> Because, if we are not careful that can quietly change and
AI will make listing to every conversation anyone has in the
county a real possibility.Are we sure mass recording isn't
already happening? It wasn't that long ago that the idea of
bulk metadata collection was thought of as tinfoil hat
material by many.
DerfNet - 1 hours ago
I always found it crazy that they didn't carry over the
hardware "recording" LED to cellphone cameras. I'd really
like to see that become a thing, and maybe another LED for
the microphone, wired into the circuit so that the camera
and/or microphone cannot be in use without the LED lighting
up. I'd basically like a row of status LEDs like an old
Thinkpad for monitoring all systems on my devices.
XorNot - 23 minutes ago
Conversely surreptious cellphone camera use is also a big
defense against police abuse of power.Not sure I'd want to
be unable to mask the camera and mic being active either.
forapurpose - 41 minutes ago
> I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is
happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there
is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring
the entire Internet.Let's say we've lost so far, but certainly we
can change. Europe, for example, has much stronger protections
than the U.S. Laws cleaned up the environment in cities, brought
a revolution in civil rights to billions .... certainly we can
provide privacy to end users if we put our minds to it. (I'm not
saying it will be easy.)
DannyBee - 2 hours ago
It's interesting to see EPIC and EFF on different sides of the same
issue. I don't feel like i've ever seen that happen.
Analemma_ - 1 hours ago
I wonder if it might've been best for the EFF to just stay out of
this one entirely, because it seems like sticking up for either
side is defending and normalizing a shitty proposition. I see
their point that LinkedIn is abusing the CFAA to stop competitive
scrapers, but on the other hand, evil as LinkedIn may be, at
least the users on it agreed to its terms. If I sign up for
LinkedIn and give them my data, I agreed to that. If HiQ slurps
it up, I'm not consenting to whatever sinister things they decide
to do with it. That feels wrong and not something the EFF should
be sticking up for.(Disclosure: I used to work for Microsoft,
which now owns LinkedIn, although I like to think I'd have this
opinion either way)
21 - 27 minutes ago
Yes, I don't quite get EFF's point.So they are saying that
anybody should be allowed to scrape anything found online, and
use that data for any purpose?In this case it can be argued
they use the data against the physical's person about who the
data is.So they wouldn't object if banks or credit companies
would use the data to reject non-desirable people.