Re:Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads
by ParanoidShroom on Monday August 09, 2021 @04:54AM
(#28114081)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads
by Dylan16807 on Monday August 09, 2021 @05:06AM
(#28114172)
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.
Re:Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads
by danuker on Monday August 09, 2021 @05:10AM
(#28114205)
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.