Should You Break TOS Because Work Asks You?

An anonymous reader writes "My boss recently assigned me a project that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites' Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we're safe on copyright issues, clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a 'load balancing' part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as 'distributed' computing when in reality it's 'parasitic.' My question is: am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk, how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?"

Comments

Hilarity ensues when...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you build a system that closely relies on this nonstandard (and unsupported) method of getting information, they change it and it breaks.

Either by accident, or because they spot a load of particular access patterns from your address, figure out what's going on and intentionally break it.

Check with Compliance Officer/Department

[Ohmaar]

I work in health care, so maybe it's different in your industry, but every hospital I've worked for has had a compliance officer with an anonymous 800-number for compliance questions. This is DEFINITELY the kind of stuff they want to know about.

Re:You're Right, Of Course

[cerberusss]

I'd advise against discussing it with HR. I've encountered the following situation: I talked to a HR manager about something that obviously should've remained confidential. However that same HR manager was part of the management team and thus had two hats on. She proceeded to inform the management team, to my astonishment.

I've come to the conclusion that HR is just a staff department and owes allegiance to, you guessed it, the management team. Not you.

Re:You're Right, Of Course

[Misch]

It's happened. ESPN connived a way to get to another sites private database and reported the data as its own. The website injected some fake data which ESPN picked up and reported and were caught.