In a past job I owned the infrastructure for scraping and crawling the Internet, and this included accessing highly personal data and executing online actions at the user’s request. Being prudent about the legality of things, my team frequently clarified use cases with Legal. The answer we got was that anything we do on behalf of a user in service of the user’s explicit request, is generally OK.
As long as it’s not otherwise unlawful, of course, e.g. no bypassing security measures, which is generally verboten for users and agents alike. (Websites try to leverage this aspect by throwing up bot-specific security measures.) Caveats: this was an decade+ ago, our use-cases were different, and case law has changed since then. But simplistically, anything a human can legally do, software can also do for them.
This makes sense to me. In fact it is explicitly encoded in the language of the web: browsers are identified as “User Agents” after all.
We just happen to be in an era where our User Agents are now much more autonomous than before, and this threatens a lot of moats built around human attention.
As long as it’s not otherwise unlawful, of course, e.g. no bypassing security measures, which is generally verboten for users and agents alike. (Websites try to leverage this aspect by throwing up bot-specific security measures.) Caveats: this was an decade+ ago, our use-cases were different, and case law has changed since then. But simplistically, anything a human can legally do, software can also do for them.
This makes sense to me. In fact it is explicitly encoded in the language of the web: browsers are identified as “User Agents” after all.
We just happen to be in an era where our User Agents are now much more autonomous than before, and this threatens a lot of moats built around human attention.