I was reading a story on slashdot about data mining on the web. The gist is that some companies use automated means (web scrapers) to obtain pricing information from other companies’ websites, which the other companies understandably want to prevent because it makes things easier for their competition. The general argument, which I initially agreed with, is that once information is published, the publisher no longer has control over the use of that information. One poster compared objections over web scraping to complaining that you’re reading a book too quickly.
Then I got to thinking about video processing in the public domain. We’re fast approaching the age where cameras are everywhere; it’s hard to venture into public without being on CCTV for some store or other, and the government certainly uses cameras to aid in policing the streets. With technologies such as face recognition becoming viable in the relatively near future, a large commercial conglomerate could easily process and store information about your movements through a city, potentially using this information to target advertising at you, selling it to other companies or to the government. The argument against this potential state of affairs, which I initially agreed with, is that such a system rapidly evolves into a Big Brother system, where some entitiy (be it the government or a commercial group) has knowledge about your movements and habits; this is generally (?) considered to be a Bad Thing.
So the conundrum: websites are public domain, so it should be legal and ethical to use the information on those websites in any way you see fit. The streets are a domain where anonymity, if not privacy, is more or less assumed, but are also a public domain and therefore it should be legal and ethical to use the information obtained from those streets in any way you see fit. How to resolve the conflict between freedom of information and right to privacy? Am I missing something that makes this debate more easily resolved? Could there be a reasonable solution?
Mods, I’m starting to wonder if this should be in GD instead… move if you think so, thanks.
Everyone else, it’s a busy time for me so forgive me if I don’t maintain a constant vigil on the discussion. I’ll try to drop in regularly though.
Error alert! Error alert! One big fat error here:
Nope. No such thing (except for websites showing information like the Ellis Island Immigration lists). Websites are copyrighted by law.
Now, whether web scrapers are a copyright violation or an example of fair use – well, I don’t believe there’s been a ruling on that yet.
However, freedom of information does assuredly not apply to copyrighted material.
As far as the other issues, what you’re discussing is the right of privacy. This is also undetermined. If some company started keeping track of your movements, there would have to be a court case to determine if they had that right. Certainly if the cops started selling information gathered from their surveillance cameras, they’d get a rain of injunctions as people complained about it.
But, hypothetically, if a company for some strange reason decided to empoly people with photographic memories to stand at every street corner and record the movement of passerbys, thish would not be in violation of any law right?
Cameras simply automate this task and bring down to a cheap enough price to be feasible.
RealityChuck, you’re quite right. Websites generally contain copyrighted material. This separates the issue from that of privacy, removing the conflict.
I’ll let others open new threads debating the separate issues of copyright as it pertains to web scraping and privacy as it pertains to public-area video processing as they see fit.
However, federal government web sites are considered public domain, although a federal site may contain copyrighted content.
How mis-managed would a company have to be to seriously think that they could keep their prices secret for any length of time? Don’t they tell their customers or potential customers the prices? And do they think these customers don’t check out their competition’s prices? Do they really think their competitors don’t already know their prices? In many businesses, all you have to do is read the newspaper ads to see what your competitor’s prices are.
I’d be cynical enough to suspect that there are other reasons that these websites want to keep their prices hidden. And that the problem is not that it “makes things easier for their competition”, but that it “makes things easier for their customers”.
Maybe like a few years ago when Amazon was caught giving one price to new shoppers, and a higher price to repeat shoppers, figuring that they’d gotten used to buying from Amazon, and didn’t check prices closely any more.
Or maybe trying to disrupt automatic shopping robots that check lots of websites and tell you who has the lowest prices on the item you’re looking for.
That seems more likely to me.