X updates its Terms to prohibit crawling/scraping of its data

skilledtothegills@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 336 points –
X updates its Terms to prohibit crawling/scraping of its data
stackdiary.com

But what if you do? Will you get caught?

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If it's publicly accessible it's scrape-able. He already tried to make tweets not publicly accessible and look how long that lasted.

It’s not even clear that it’s illegal to scrape publicly available data, so I don’t know what the TOS would be enforcing.

It didn't have to be illegal for them to sue you for violating its policies. It would be a civil suit for damages.

Lol, then they would have to demonstrate that there were damages. The worst a TOS violation will get you is a ban.

Unfortunately, they have more money to blow on legal fees. The threat of a suit is enough to keep most perks from fucking around and finding out.

Would it be violating policy if the scrapper only took the public data and never actually signed the ToS since they didn't make an account?

It's not publicly available anymore. If you're not logged in you don't see anything anymore except tweets you have a direct link to. Even then you don't see any replies and the amount of tweets per day you can see is limited.

Yep, would never remember on the odd occasions I would look at Twitter, then just leave the site after being prompted to login