@polotek the way people flip out about federating data on a service explicitly designed to federate data is rather interesting. You’d think that if you wanted to have a private community you’d post to a private encrypted service instead.

Kind of similar to people being mad about people using data off their public accessible to the world websites. If you publish it to the world, expect the world to access/download it.

@dalias @polotek I get that scraping makes everyone mad.

But it’s fundamentally how the open internet/protocols works. You can try to use copyright and the courts to fight it after the fact for webpages or terms of service agreements. Just that fundamentally, if there’s something you cannot allow to be scraped, then you can never allow yourself to put it on the open internet.

It doesn’t mean the open internet has no value either. It’s just a very important design trade off. And for other things where you need different trade offs you need to use tools that work differently.

@HitokiriEric @polotek There's a huge difference between technically possible, legal, and socially acceptable.

Bulk aggregation (scraping) of records of people's activity in public places without their explicit & genuine consent should always be socially unacceptable.

In some jurisdictions it's illegal. It probably should be illegal.

Of course it's technically possible. Just like it's technically possible to follow on the street with cameras and microphones...