A simple overall rule here is to consider what the intended behaviour was from the company offering this. Anything that fits the rules, but is outside what you would consider expected behaviour is essentially exploiting a bug.
A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely within the allowed behaviour, but it's clearly intended to make it easy for people to backup their photos and documents without having to know if a gigabyte is enough or not.
I would say I feel like using something in a way not intended (even if allowed) that is detrimental to the person/people offering it is unethical when considered in isolation.
I'm actually a little surprised this needs saying, is this not a common view?
edit - I guess not if it was downvoted so quickly (I know, I know, I'm not complaining about the internet points, it's honestly very interesting to me). Are people that on board wit h heavily abusing systems just because it's technically within the rules?
Remind me to never offer free pizza at a HN event as someone may turn up, say "you didn't specify a per person limit" and walk off with the food intended for everyone.
I don't subscribe to your view at all, but I think this is an interesting discussion. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
My local gym and Moviepass (remember them?) expects people to sign up and rarely use the gym or watch movies. Otherwise, they would go out of business if everyone actually constantly used them. Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical? It sounds like you're calling lot of people unethical. Aren't people heavily abusing Moviepass by actually watching movies nearly every day?
In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies.
> If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
No, that's missing the key part that it has to be detrimental to the person offering it.
> Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical?
I don't think so, if you're using the service because you want to go to the gym every day or see all the films. The website for moviepass says "see it all" so it seems reasonable to go and see every film. Finding a 24 hour cinema and living in it because now you don't have to pay rent - seems unethical to me.
Imagine if moviepass said "see a film every week" but technically didn't say you couldn't see many every day. The underlying rules are technically the same - if you knew they had to pay most of the cost of a ticket, would you feel like the ethics of going every day would be different?
I said it was a simple rule, as there will be edge cases for everything and wider contexts (blocking a road as an act in isolation seems bad, but what if it's a protest, etc). There are though obvious answers to me, and getting eighteen grand a year for rapidly moving money back and forth is one that has an easy answer.
> In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
Comes down to level of harm, just like anything else. Remove the brand Facebook from that as it's a vast empire. What if it were a small local service for residents to catch up, and political fighting would mean they'd have to shut down?
> It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies
Is it ethical to go to an all you can eat restaurant and if there's no explicit sign stopping you then packing up all the food in huge bags and walking out?
If there's a sample table that says "free cakes" would you take all of them?
If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved. It leads to one person basically not liking something (drugs, activism, etc.) and calling it unethical because of some broad claims about harm to society.
> If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
The financial company didn't run a website saying "want to be paid thousands? Move money back and forth repeatedly with our services!".
> On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved.
Different actors are different so I don't see why that's a concern. Different intent is also surely not an odd addition here? It's foundational in so many legal systems even.
I think it would be better to assume that any service you offer could be exploited, than to think otherwise. Lots of places run deals and sales on items with the condition "limit x per person per day" for that exact reason. Or an "unlimited" high-speed phone plan might have a restriction in the fine print where you're throttled after some amount.
Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.
A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely within the allowed behaviour, but it's clearly intended to make it easy for people to backup their photos and documents without having to know if a gigabyte is enough or not.
I would say I feel like using something in a way not intended (even if allowed) that is detrimental to the person/people offering it is unethical when considered in isolation.
I'm actually a little surprised this needs saying, is this not a common view?
edit - I guess not if it was downvoted so quickly (I know, I know, I'm not complaining about the internet points, it's honestly very interesting to me). Are people that on board wit h heavily abusing systems just because it's technically within the rules?
Remind me to never offer free pizza at a HN event as someone may turn up, say "you didn't specify a per person limit" and walk off with the food intended for everyone.