It's probably because Facebook touches more people daily than "most of the companies"? (1.9 billions daily and 2.89 billions monthly according to their latest quaterly report[0], and that's for the Facebook website only, not the whole family products).

The website can also have an influence on many people lives since a lot of people use it as one of their main source of information etc.

[0] : https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...

Read the article first. This was logging activity in the browser, not scraping.

At what point does logging thousand of web response not become scraping? I would call collecting a dataset scraping. It's a legit question, I'm not trying to be snarky here.

The normal meaning of scraping is that you have to be automating bulk access to the site, which isn't happening here.

And even under a different definition that would count normal browsing activity, the researchers still aren't doing scraping here. And each user is only collecting a few data points.

You are right, this is scraping. But I argue it is manual scraping - the data gets transferred even in the case of a regular user, just not saved.

As far as I interpret it, only automated scraping is against the ToS:

https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php

> You may not access or collect data from our Products using automated means (without our prior permission) or attempt to access data you do not have permission to access.

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/update

What exactly is sensational about it?