So much bad faith in this press release but not surprising from such a disgusting company, with of course some China-related fear-mongering despite no evidence of wrongdoing.<p>> After paying for access to the scraping software, customers self-compromised their Facebook and Instagram accounts by providing their authentication information to Octopus.<p>They didn't "self-compromise" their account. They trust Octopus to act on their behalf, and unlike Facebook, Octopus' interests are most likely more aligned with their users' since their service is paid. This is no different from handing your Facebook credentials to your social media manager or secretary. There's no evidence that Octopus misused this access in any way.<p>> Octopus designed the software to scrape data accessible to the user when logged into their accounts, including data about their Facebook Friends such as email address, phone number, gender and date of birth, as well as Instagram followers and engagement information such as name, user profile URL, location and number of likes and comments per post.<p>This is either information people intend to be public or information they trust their friends to keep private. Now if Octopus was leaking the private information to third-parties it would be one thing, but so far I see no evidence Octopus was disclosing the scraped information to anyone but their customer (who is already authorized to access it).<p>> Meta is an industry leader in taking legal action to protect people from scraping and exposing these types of services<p>Translation: Meta is an industry leader in protecting its disgusting business model that hinges on making public data behind a walled garden with an unacceptable "privacy" policy. There wouldn't be a market for Octopus (or other scrapers) if Facebook already allowed customers to <i>efficiently</i> access information they're already entitled to, but that would be against their interests as their entire business hinges on information being held hostage.<p>They've created a problem, are selling the cure (well in this case monetizing it via ads) and are now pissed off that someone else is selling the cure for cheaper.
What hypocrite these companies(fb, google, linkedin, twitter, etc.) are.... Almost entirety of the content on their sites is user generated and shared with public scope. Then why the hell these companies think it's wrong to scrape that very "public" data.<p>The reason is simple: they just want to maintain their monopoly on the data. That's it. These companies themselves run their advertising companies based on the very same data and train their machine learning models, and also, actually sell it(cambridge analytics, ... possibly 1000's more through 3rd party partnerships to take the blame if things go wrong).<p>US companies are truly monstrous... by size, and their ability to care for others.
Scraping publicly shared data should actually be made legal. It's "public" data.<p>These companies themselves scrape entire internet. How come facebook content lands up in google search? Is that not scraping? Facebook also runs it's own scrapers over internet. What about those?<p>It's simple: a user choosing to share their data publicly "is" public data and NOT facebook's property. Fuck zuckerberg! The asshole.
I am surprised Meta took this aggressive approach considering they automatically populate autogenerated public pages with content drawn from Wikipedia whenever available (at least thats how it looks, with a tiny attribution to the source. But most importantly, Wikipedia infobox & page photo show up majority of the cases as primary information).<p>So Meta scraping Wikipedia is okay, but other entities scraping Facebook-owned media isn't?
Didn't linkedin lost a lawsuit related to scraping <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/court-rules-that-data-scraping-is-legal-in-linkedin-appeal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/court-rules-that-data-scraping...</a>
I use LinkedIn for two reasons:<p>1. So that other humans can use it in a personal capacity to find out about me.<p>2. As a way of boxing all recruiter spam into a single location.<p>The LinkedIn terms and conditions restrict usage of my data to those purposes. That's why I'm comfortable publishing my data there.<p>Having my personal data indexed by Google makes it easier for people to accomplish (1) and the copyright restrictions on that data result in (2).<p>To those saying that scraping of all "public" data should be unrestricted: how would you suggest I meet my above goals?