The first two could qualify as 'mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information' depending how liberally that's interpreted. Extortion is already illegal, anyway (but then again, so are many of the prohibited activities in this license, although I suppose it's not illegal to simply 'support' them as this license prohibits).
Not to mention all sort of "review" websites where your company is suddenly flooded with extremely negative reviews and you get a helpful call from the website owner being like "hey, I see you got a lot of bad reviews, but don't worry, for only $5000 you can get our premium membership that lets you get them removed".
Because it happened to my company. A "review your employer" website went from having few reviews of us to literally having few thousand reviews in a week(which in itself was a dead giweaway as we had maybe 50 employees total with 100 over the lifetime of the company), all extremely negative, but very simple and vague in content so you couldn't make a legal case against any one of them.
We took it to a lawyer but he said that it's clearly blackmail but it would be extremely hard to get any kind of judgement against it. We just ignored it and that company eventually folded and disappeared and the website with them, but I'm pretty sure it made hiring somewhat more difficult for a while.
OK thanks. Good to hear that the problem went away in your case.
I was interested since I believe we need the sort of quality-control that these review websites offer - the problem is the corruption of the review process that often (always?) takes place, and the crudeness of the review parameters. Google Pagerank (or whatever it is called nowadays) is not a satisfactory quality sifting tool.
> its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free
If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie.
Adtech is kind of like that. If I give a calendar app access to my contacts I certainly don't expect it to take that information and use it for tracking, targeting, and marketing purposes as well. For me to "give" you that information for free, you'd have to ask for it honestly. And yet Facebook - an ad tech company - has been fighting this kind of consent in the next iOS patch tooth-and-nail.
> If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie.
