Re:Scraping Instagram
by Nextgrid on Thursday March 31, 2022 @06:46PM
(#30873087)
> it is certainly not an approach that scales
If there's demand for their service I don't see why it wouldn't scale. Get more phones, more SIM cards, and have automation around all this infrastructure to automate away as much of the stuff as possible.
> Meta/Instagram have multiple teams dedicated to preventing this type of scraping
That's great but ultimately they still have a weakness: they want people to be able to see their stuff - at least some of it - without logging in. As long as you can either simulate a normal device perfectly, or even better, use real devices or virtualize them, there isn't much that Facebook can do without impacting legitimate usage which they don't want.
If there's demand for their service I don't see why it wouldn't scale. Get more phones, more SIM cards, and have automation around all this infrastructure to automate away as much of the stuff as possible.
> Meta/Instagram have multiple teams dedicated to preventing this type of scraping
That's great but ultimately they still have a weakness: they want people to be able to see their stuff - at least some of it - without logging in. As long as you can either simulate a normal device perfectly, or even better, use real devices or virtualize them, there isn't much that Facebook can do without impacting legitimate usage which they don't want.