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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

If I have to stake out a binary position here, I’m pro scraping. But I really wish we could find a way to be more nuanced here. The scraper in question is looking at public LinkedIn profiles so that it can snitch to employers about which employees might be looking for new jobs. That’s not at all the same as archival; it’s using my data to harm me.

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It's a public page. Your employer could just as well check your page theirself. It may be a tragedy of efficiency, but it's not like the scraper is grabbing hidden data. The issue is in something else. Maybe it's the fact that your current employer would punish you for looking for a new job. Or maybe LinkedIn's public "looking for job" status is not sustainable in it's current form.

Yes, and if I have a public Twitter account it’s perfectly possible for someone to flood me with spam messages. That doesn’t mean we should do nothing to prevent it. As I said elsewhere, we should strive to make it possible for people to exist in public digital spaces without worrying about bad actors.

Someone can manually spam you, and I don't think that should be allowed. That is a separate topic and discussion. Unless you are arguing that your employer should not be allowed to check your LinkedIn status.

I’m just using it as an example of a case in which a public profile doesn’t automatically mean anything goes. I had hoped to generate discussion about how to throw out some of the bathwater without throwing out the baby too, but I guess no one is really interested.

Weev was charged, and eventually convicted based merely on scraping from AT&T [0]. When the charge was vacated, it was only on venue/jurisdiction, not on the basis of the scraping being legal. Seems there's precedent merely scraping this information is felonious behavior.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/weevs-case-flawed-begi...

Yes, but it’s specifically using data you published to harm you. Compare Blind, which is engineered to not be attributable in this way.

I understand that I published it. That doesn’t mean I should accept that hostile parties will use it against me.

This is kinda like telling someone who is being harassed on social media that they’re consenting to it by having a public account. We should strive to make our digital personae safe from bad actors, not throw our hands up and say “if you put yourself out there, you have no recourse”.

While I don't condemn such snitching, I'm not sure how the responsibility doesn't fall on the social media user for publicly advertising their search or "professionally friending" prospective employers. Neither action is necessary.

Is it so difficult to imagine that we might write laws to prevent corporations from vacuuming up our data and selling it to be used against us?

Again, I am pro-scraping. I see the benefits. But I don’t think this is a situation in which we have to accept all or nothing.

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