These sorts of 'grey market' APIs already have a lot of infrastructure support too. Paid APIs haven't been the push, but people have wanted programmatic access to other peoples' site data for a while now. The real driver has just been "no API", not "pricey API".
Re:Premium Account Activity API
by vinceguidry on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @02:52PM
(#17085310)
Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's "crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.
Not that I know of, I just know that there's an ecosystem of bespoke site wrappers that people will pay for, and some folks who are quite good at it. Kind of grey hat stuff and it's been a few years since I was in contact with the scene, if you could call it that.
Re:Premium Account Activity API
by StudentStuff on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @06:27PM
(#17086976)
Downloading a webpage and returning a snippet of it via API isn't greyhat work, just like building a search engine isn't greyhat work. Processing public websites is white hat work, and very common too! If a business wants to restrict access, they can take down their website.
Re:Premium Account Activity API
by vinceguidry on Thursday May 17, 2018 @11:50AM
(#17092384)
Any company that has anything valuable that anyone else would want is going to put TOS there prohibiting scraping, making it grey hat and legally risky.
You don’t even have to pay. Just disassemble one of the official apps, snatch the private keys and use them to connect to the API. Enjoy having access to everything with (almost) no rate limiting.
Re:Premium Account Activity API
by applecrazy on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @06:04PM
(#17086857)
That can be mitigated easily by rotating keys in every app update.
But if the price is high enough, couldn't a third party operating out of another part of the world undercut them using scraping, a dedicated team, and a clean API? Twitter may have technical remedies but it is unlikely they'd have legal ones outside of the US and a few Western countries.
Official APIs Vs. "pirate" APIs haven't really been a major issue until now because companies simply weren't charging enough to make the alternative cost effective. Is that going to change with pricing strategies like this one?