

Ask HN: Is it unethical to sell scraped 'people data'? - coderdude

Consider hCard on Web pages as a source. Would it be unethical to scrape and sell the data people put out there?<p>What about email addresses? I'm curious about how people feel.
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gtani
Consider the Netflix and AOL search data, where people _could_ (maybe) be
identfied from "anonymized" data. Or the facebook gaydar thing.

[http://33bits.org/2008/09/30/law-review-article-about-
netfli...](http://33bits.org/2008/09/30/law-review-article-about-netflix-
paper/)

harvesting emails, that is an established business model called...

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Alex3917
The people have their information online for people to contact them. If you
want to scrape the data and contact some of them then that's fine, as long as
the email you send to each individual is personal and relevant.

Doing anything else with the data is unethical, because that's not what
they've signed up for.

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Travis
Yes, I think it's unethical. First, the data belongs to me, and I'm allowing a
specific site to use it -- not you. Even for sites that claim they own my
data, it still doesn't give you any rights to it.

Further, it is likely a violation of the ToS of a site if you're doing that.

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jfarmer
You've just uncovered Rapleaf's business model.

