alt Hacker Newssmeels like severe breach of ToS. virtually every single website and app mandates not to reverse engineer and not to temper with inner workings (including client-server networking).
side note, YC25/YC26 batches have multiple startups that blantly violate ToS and sitting on a timebomb just pending a lawsuite and Cease and Desist Letters.
Replies
jasonlotito • today at 7:33 PM
Wait till these sites discover web browsers and developer tools.
The goal is not to scrape sites en-masse, but to allow people to automate their existing workflows and actions that they perform already via a browser. I understand the concerns around this being unethical, and it's something I spent a lot of time thinking about when I worked on automations previously. I've written a decent amount about how I don't think that sneaker bots or ticket bots are ethical. I don't support mass scraping websites/making the web more inaccessible for others.
I do have to push back on the ToS comments though. Automation is used daily by nearly all companies. RPA is a billion dollar industry. Browserbase raised at 300M valuation. Is using puppeteer to automate a form submission a violation of ToS? If so then why is using a screen reader not? Is it the intention? Why is hitting network requests directly different? I personally don't think that automation is unethical (as long as it is not affecting server capacity). I don't think the answer to the ethical problems in scraping is just not to automate at all. Open to disagreement here though.