Scrape Off !

My landline telephone number was misappropriated by scammers. I'm not sure if one would call that scraping, because they could have used a local telephone directory.

The first I know of it was an early morning call from a gentleman who sounded suspiciously thrilled to be "returning" (my) "call". He seemed to think that I might be coming to Idaho. Goodness knows what he imagined I would do for him when I got there!   Then, there was a man returning my call (or not), who was under the impression that I wanted to buy a car from him. By the time I received a midnight call from a distraught woman in Canada who thought I was a hospital with horrific tidings for her, I had figured out that my Do-Not-Call-Registry-listed number had been spoofed.

What one should do is calmly and kindly tell such callers that one's number has been spoofed; that one is very sorry for their inconvenience and distress; that they can call the FCC at 1-888-225-5322 for further information. What I did, not having the FCC number to hand, was tell them the good news that if they had answered "my" call in real time, they would have spoken with a scammer.

I have since received a call from Australia, repeated calls from someone's infantile grandchildren, an eager call back from a realtor in Louisiana who thought I wanted to rent a property, and a couple of calls from a site that is silent for a while, then thanks me for calling them. I'd probably pay phone sex rates if I stayed on the line out of curiosity.

411.com for one site selling phone number information  is highly unreliable. I looked up my phone number, and to my astonishment, discovered that I live in California. So much for Artificial Intelligence!

Apparently, it may not be illegal to sell inaccurate information.  It is also, not Computer Fraud And Abuse to "scrape" information from social media sites and sell on that information for commercial profit.

Karl Bode, writing for vice.com  recently discussed the lawsuit by LinkedIn against HiQ for "scraping" information that LinkedIn users posted on LinkedIn about themselves, and selling the information to others.

 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kek83/linkedin-data-scraping-lawsuit-shot-down

However, the problem may have been that LinkedIn did not have rights to the information that HiQ scraped. The LinkedIn users might have rights that have not been asserted, such as their own copyright over the information they wrote for their profiles, or privacy rights.

The details are well explained by Michael A. Jacobs and  J. Alexander Lawrence on the Morrison Foerster law blog:
https://www.mofo.com/resources/publications/190916-ninth-circuits-linkedin-decision.html

As Rob Nussbaum points out for Saiber, on the Trending Law blog, social media site users should be aware that what they post on public sites can be scraped up and monetized by others.
https://trendinglawblog.com/2019/09/16/the-ninth-circuit-takes-on-web-scraping/

Beware what you post that others can scrape.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

Trojan Horses For Kids, Rampant Scraping

Authors are warned not to "scrape" social media sites for the email addresses of potential readers. Since the GDPR, (Europe's General Data Protection Regulation) we are admonished to double-verify that a person affirmatively and enthusiastically wishes to receive an author's newsletter.

There are also strict rules about authors' contests.  All wise authors considering a promotion to build up a mailing list, or to attract social media approbation ("Likes"), should read this article.
https://www.frostbrowntodd.com/resources-1069.html

In nutshell, it might be illegal in your State, province or neck of the woods to run a "contest" where there is
1) a prize,
2) an element of chance in selecting the recipient of the prize,
3) a requirement that all contestants provide something of value to the contest organizer as a condition of entry.

This author has never yet seen another author sued for running an illegal sweepstakes where the prize is a free copy of an e-book, no skill is required to enter, and a chance to win the e-book is entirely conditional upon joining a Facebook group (or the like).

As for those Trojan Horses filled with geek warriors aiming to get the goods on little kids, PJ Media columnist Phil Baker shares some shocking data about forced scraping, dossiers, and data-mining.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-is-developing-dossiers-on-students-using-their-products-in-classrooms-disclosures-show/?fbclid=IwAR2l5F4eIr_UfNRasqBVXDzMWUv1uR0NfLFqYSkaue-6GTjPPsVxkPvcD8I

Allegedly, all too many schools force K-12 children to use certain products that are deliberately contaminated with the vendor/developer's spyware. The children and their parents have no choice, either they accept the devices and the risk to their children's privacy, or they have to home school.

Also allegedly, school employees in Pennsylvania have been given permission to remotely access school computers that have been provided to children... when those computers are being used in the students' homes, without the knowledge or consent of the children or their parents.

Maybe every parent should stick an address label over the camera hole in their offspring's school-issued
devices!

Scraping children is especially bad, because many of the credit monitoring products are not available for youngsters.

Targeting advertising at little children is also, in this author's opinion, immoral because children's brains and powers of critical reasoning are not fully developed, and won't be until the children are about 26 years old.

What about businesses scraping other businesses' data? Is that theft or fair game?  Without addressing the rights of a minor public figure who might wish to have a presence on book-lovers social media site X, but not on advertising-heavy social media site Y (and yet Site Y might create a presence for the public figure without permission), there have been legal skirmishes between businesses fighting over each other's inventory of members and their basic data.

Legal blogger Scott L. Satkin, writing for the law firm Newmeyer and Dillion LLP  discusses what, if anything, counts as "unauthorized access" to "publicly available" data.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5e951f2d-55c7-42a3-a539-fbe88165ea5a&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2018-12-06&utm_term=

It is interesting to consider what, if any, rights a person or business that has collected "data" on members (or subscribers or users) might have over that data if that data is visible on the internet

Scott L Satkin and the lawsuits he discusses are about social media businesses and their subscribers. Authors seeking to build up a following might join a more successful author's social media group, and scrape the contact info and demographics of reader-members.

Scraping is rampant. Is it expected?

The authors of  this blog do not (to the best of this author's knowledge) collect or save or otherwise exploit any information about any readers or visitors. From time to time, we do warn visitors that our host (Blogger) does place tracking cookies on visitors' devices.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry