Suit To Let Researchers Break Website Rules Wins a Round (axios.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Anyone following Facebook's recent woes with Cambridge Analytica might be surprised to hear that there's a civil liberties argument for swiping data from websites, even while violating their terms of service. In fact, there's a whole world of situations where that thinking could apply: bona fide academic research. On Friday, a judge in a D.C. federal court ruled that an American Civil Liberties Union-backed case trying to guarantee researchers the ability to break sites' rules without being arrested could move forward, denying a federal motion to dismiss. "What we're talking about here is research in the public interest, finding out if there is discrimination," Esha Bhandari, an ACLU attorney representing the academics, told Axios.

Comments

You could justify

[macxcool]

just about anything if you start with 'in the public interest' and 'finding out if there is discrimination'. Also. Can people just use 'unjust discrimination' instead? Discrimination is what we do as human beings. We can't function without it. (sorry. Pet Peave).

Re:You could justify

[CrimsonAvenger]

Read summary, and this was the first thing that occurred to me.

ANYTHING can be defined as "in the public interest", if your lawyers are halfway decent. Including having the government spy on everyone, all the time.

This looks like the beginning of a very slippery slope, and we aren't going to enjoy the ride to the bottom even a little bit....

DO remember that even if you approve of this sort of thing when done to your enemies (political and otherwise), it won't be nearly so much fun when they use it against you by and by.

And they will....