1) I didn't say there aren't uses. I asked what yours was. Since we're having a technical discussion, I figured the typical "why am I doing this" would be a good part of the back and forth. As you mentioned in the article you think they used to export this info, but stopped. So maybe this is a time to step back and say "should I?". Also a healthy part of the discussion.
2) I suppose. Rather, I think it'd be best to once again examine the possible why and note that you are purposefully breaking an agreement you signed up for. For a fun comparison, what are the terms of service or user agreement used by AccountBerry? Do you have a similar agreement that might not allow for scraping either? And what if someone did anyway? You may not notice, but what if you did because they coded in error and slammed your system?
Like I've said, I've created lots of spiders/bots/scrapers. It is fun. And there are great reasons to make them.
But a discussion of the ethics of building them to use to scrape data from sites that you agreed not to scrape is an interesting article-worthy thing to think about. Hopefully an aspiring scraper-maker reads your article and this discussion and keeps it in mind.
1) Can't be too specific, but is for data analytics purposes. Why wouldn't they want them to be exported if I could get them by going to each connection one by one manually? The scraper basically automates that tedious process. I mean, connections agreed to share certain info, and email is just one of that information (they could even set it so the email is not shown).
2) I completely understand your point and I agree completely. I did break the agreement unknowingly (until you pointed it out), but there was no malicious intent. I only automatized a process I am allowed to do manually. I find that if you write some code to automatize a process you can achieve manually, then there shouldn't be no restriction to it. It's like a post I read yesterday, a person had 400 unread messages and couldn't select them all to mark them as read, so he just opened the dev tools and wrote a simple code to loop through all the messages and click them. My response "I guess they'll have to suspend/ban me." is based on that what is done is done.
Maybe adding "For educational purposes" changes the whole context of what is written?
1) I didn't say there aren't uses. I asked what yours was. Since we're having a technical discussion, I figured the typical "why am I doing this" would be a good part of the back and forth. As you mentioned in the article you think they used to export this info, but stopped. So maybe this is a time to step back and say "should I?". Also a healthy part of the discussion.
2) I suppose. Rather, I think it'd be best to once again examine the possible why and note that you are purposefully breaking an agreement you signed up for. For a fun comparison, what are the terms of service or user agreement used by AccountBerry? Do you have a similar agreement that might not allow for scraping either? And what if someone did anyway? You may not notice, but what if you did because they coded in error and slammed your system?
Like I've said, I've created lots of spiders/bots/scrapers. It is fun. And there are great reasons to make them.
But a discussion of the ethics of building them to use to scrape data from sites that you agreed not to scrape is an interesting article-worthy thing to think about. Hopefully an aspiring scraper-maker reads your article and this discussion and keeps it in mind.
1) Can't be too specific, but is for data analytics purposes. Why wouldn't they want them to be exported if I could get them by going to each connection one by one manually? The scraper basically automates that tedious process. I mean, connections agreed to share certain info, and email is just one of that information (they could even set it so the email is not shown).
2) I completely understand your point and I agree completely. I did break the agreement unknowingly (until you pointed it out), but there was no malicious intent. I only automatized a process I am allowed to do manually. I find that if you write some code to automatize a process you can achieve manually, then there shouldn't be no restriction to it. It's like a post I read yesterday, a person had 400 unread messages and couldn't select them all to mark them as read, so he just opened the dev tools and wrote a simple code to loop through all the messages and click them. My response "I guess they'll have to suspend/ban me." is based on that what is done is done.
Maybe adding "For educational purposes" changes the whole context of what is written?
Lol.. "For educational purposes" & "Don't try this at home, especially in the kitchen"