- Meta, the organization which has entirely shifted their focus towards the Metaverse, was scrapped by a Chinese organization.
- Meta (formerly Facebook) has been criticized previously by several experts,as they think the organization makes unethical use of data.
- Though web scraping appears to be illegitimate, a US court ruled around 3 months ago that web scraping is legal.
Meta And Scrappers In The Arena
This is not the latest news that mammoth organizations in the sector are surrounded by data scrappers — the parasites that extract the data of the organizations through their websites — who sneak past the websites and gather the data from various sources.
A latest addition in such cases involves a Chinese organization against whom Meta is filing a lawsuit for data scraping.
Recently, a US court ruled that web scraping can be done legally by the organization. The decision came during the conclusion of the LinkedIn vs Hiq Labs case, where the organization scraped the user data from the platform to show the employee attrition.
The outcome was a 50-50 win for the organizations doing data scraping, as it proved to be a ray of sunshine for such companies. Meanwhile, it was a loss for the folks who were using the platforms, from where the data was being scraped, eventually compromising their data privacy more.
Other Data Scraping Cases
Data scraping was born alongside the initiation of the Internet in this world. No matter what, there will be some hosts who will enter the system, extract the data, and use it for their respective purposes.
This is not the only case of data scraping, but some prominent organizations have been involved in similar lawsuits before.
Take example for the the 3Taps and PadMapper vs Craigslist case during 2021, when both the websites scraped the data to lure the users on their websites.
Another lawsuit includes the PR Aviation case vs Ryanair, where PR Aviation tried to make use of data available on Ryanair, which was against their terms of service.
Though data scraping has become legal, it is still an unethical way to make use of data copied from another website.
However, this kind of act should not be considered unethical when they are scraping data from such organizations that are already making immoral use of data from their user base.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/07/06/chinese-goblins-loots-data-from-meta/