Wow, they've built a distributed Amazon listing scraping system – essentially a botnet.<p>As someone who has done a lot of web scraping and had to route around a lot of blocking (we have business contracts to allow scraping, but they don't stop over-eager sysadmins), this feels like a dream come true.<p>But I'd never actually want to use this for scraping and I'm not sure any informed user would agree to use this.
> Unless of course you don’t consider the information collected here personal.<p>I don’t. The author even goes out of their way to point out that these requests aren’t generated by the user and so there’s no latent interest information there. I agree that they should cover this behavior in the privacy policy explicitly, but there’s a tone of moral outrage in this piece that seems unearned.
I use Keepa basic and it has saved me a ton of money. I always just assumed it was scraping the prices from pages I visit, but I didn't know it would automatically fetch Amazon pages in the background. Might just sign out of Amazon, and use a separate browser to purchase from it.<p>Either way, I have some thinking to do on if I should "keepa" it or not (sorry really bad joke). Maybe I should purposely turn a blind eye and just trust they aren't going to do anything evil nor have some privacy risk due to how useful it is.
I can't quite understand this article and its conclusion.<p>The article says: "[The extension] will collect information about the products you look at and the ones you search for".<p>Yet, two sentences later it says "The company behind the extension fails to comply with its legal obligations. The privacy policy is misleading in claiming that no personal data is being collected."<p>So which personal information is exactly included in the data submitted to their servers about the products? Because in that json example I don't see anything that would be even close to personal information.<p>The remote scraping/execution abilities are not great, I'll give it that. But the rest of it seems like overblown conclusion and interpretation of how it works.
And not sure if Amazon would agree to this as it essentially threatens the privacy and integrity of their users. Interestingly, Keepa is also an Amazon Affiliate, so they are in a direct business relationship with Amazon.
If the additional Amazon pages are loaded on days when the user hasn’t browsed Amazon, or done once a day, that could be cookie stuffing, explicitly prohibited by Amazon Affiliate terms. The Amazon affiliate cookies last 24 hours, so triggering a session when a user doesn’t do it, might extent their affiliate window and is not right at all.
From the Keepa addon settings:<p>> Allow the add-on to gather Amazon prices to improve our price data<p>I thought it was common knowledge that Keepa uses the addon to gather prices. Though with GDPR it probably needs to be more explicitly said.
Do you remember the time when this weird German startup that publishes an Adblocker tried to start an "Acceptable Ads" program and extort money from Google? Guess what their CTO is up to now.<p>Exactly. Showing the world the shady business of browser plugins.