'Scrapers' Dig Deep For Data On Web

srwellman writes "The practice of Web 'scraping' is growing as many firms offer to collect personal, and potentially incriminating, data about users from their social networking profiles and discussions. Many companies even collect online conversations and personal details from social networks, job sites and forums where people might discuss their lives and even potentially sensitive data, such as health issues. These scrapers operate in a legal grey area leaving many users exposed." We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt.

Comments

The link in the summary is a dupe

[Nero Nimbus]

This was talked about back in October:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/15/1340244/Data-Miners-Scraping-Away-Our-Privacy?from=rss

I thought the guy in the picture looked familiar...

Re:Bravo

[TypoNAM]

He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

I don't think we need to dig any deeper to come to the conclusion that this guy is an idiot.

Indeed, Joseph Swanson.

Re:Like Google?

[betterunixthanunix]

The battle for online privacy was lost long ago.

Only because one side of the battle never bothered to fight. Nobody was forced to go to social networking websites and post their life story, anyone could encrypt their email and IM conversations, and ad blocking software is widely available. Large amounts of the information that these companies are aggregating could have been made far more difficult to obtain if the majority of computer users could have been bothered.

Sadly, the Internet has become more of an adversarial game than a way to unite people.