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

Re:You're Right, Of Course

[GrpA]

I've also had similar requests in the past, and in both cases I did the work. I considered the request, decided they were ethical (even if somewhat unusual) and so did it. That's something you're going to have to figure out for yourself - whether you're going to do it or not.

I've been on the other side of the fence also...

If you're relying on data for commercial use, putting yourself in a position where you need that data is a risky thing...

I had a scraper once come after me. I caught them - as the previous poster pointed out, it's easy... I didn't block them. I captured and redirected their requests so I could control what they got and, well, sent them some information that made them look really, really stupid. They were angry, but there wasn't much they could do.

They were just enthusiasts - they had no business risk in their application suddenly failing.

Let your boss know the risk he is facing and then ask him if he really wants to risk being caught and shut down unexpectedly, or worse, finding someone has poisened his data.

It's just not good for business.

GrpA

Re:You're Right, Of Course

[SatanicPuppy]

The example that would leap to my mind is a number of services that allow you to "map" an ip address to a geographic location...I use one of those for my job search homepage, and it only allows ~200 queries a day for the "free" account...It would be plenty useful to have as a free service (targeted advertising), and if you set up enough "free" accounts, you could use it that way.

Since I'm doing all my job searching away from where I'm currently living, I use mine to make sure that my job searching page always looks "under construction" for people who live where I live. My boss actually checks it occasionally, I guess to make sure I'm not trying to leave.