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Preventing web scraping is good for privacy

It's bad for freedom. Very, very very bad.

Talking about the "privacy" of what has been made publicly available makes no sense.



>It's bad for freedom

So are laws in the real world about stealing.

>Talking about the "privacy" of what has been made publicly available makes no sense.

Yes, it does. Users often wish to be able to delete or make something that was once public private. For example someone could post a picture of themselves on twitter. A year later they are no longer comfortable with having pictures of themself online so they go and delete them. Despite the user deleting them malicious scrapers will not delete them and keep those images. Another example would be setting your real name to your twitter name. Later you aren't comfortable using your real name so you change it away. Scrapers may still have your real name despite you wanting it to be a secret.


Users often wish to be able to delete or make something that was once public private.

People also wish to be be able to do a lot of other things, but that doesn't make it right.

What becomes public history must remain immutable. Otherwise you're just going to encourage a state in which those who have the power to will destroy and rewrite the past to their advantage, to control the narrative over the population. The trendy phrase "right to forget" is effectively a "right to rewrite history".

It's interesting that you automatically call those wanting to preserve what could possibly be very important history "malicious scrapers".


>It's interesting that you automatically call those wanting to preserve what could possibly be very important history "malicious scrapers".

I am going off of twitter's view. If you store tweets locally you must listen for when they get deleted and then delete them on your end too. If a scraper is breaking twitter's rules I consider that malicious scraper.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/policy#3.Up...

>If you store Twitter Content offline, you must keep it up to date with the current state of that content on Twitter.


So you don't believe in freedom of speech. Got it. Google should not exist and other great ideas.


I never gave my opinion on privacy. Also, Google can exist just fine if they were not allowed to store private documents.


You don't believe in freedom of thought or speech. Period.




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