[Air-L] TOS & data scraping ethics

[Casey Lynn Fiesler]

Hello everyone!

I’m always a bit reluctant to ping lists about my own work, but over the past few years I’ve seen several conversations come across this list about the ethics of TOS violations and I’ve alluded to this research before.

I assume many of you have heard about the result of the ACLU lawsuit (feat. Christian Sandvig) that dropped last week; if not: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-rules-big-data-discrimination-studies-do-not-violate-federal-anti

Though completely coincidentally, just before that I was finalizing a paper that is published (but sadly not presented, because COVID) at ICWSM this year about the law and ethics of data collection against TOS. This was a collaboration with Brian Keegan here at CU also, and former student Nate Beard who is now working on his PhD at University of Maryland.  The TL;DR is that it’s based on both an analysis of the current legal/ethical landscape and on the actual data scraping provisions from 100+ social media sites.  We end with discussion of why we think TOS is inappropriate for ethical decisions in either direction.

Of course, this doesn’t actually provide you with an answer for “is it ethical to scrape data” but my hope is that it provides some additional context for making that decisions.

Here’s a choose your own adventure for checking this out if you’re interested:

the (long-ish) paper: https://cmci.colorado.edu/~cafi5706/ICWSM2020_datascraping.pdf
the (much shorter) blog post: https://medium.com/@cfiesler/spiders-and-crawlers-and-scrapers-oh-my-law-and-ethics-of-researchers-violating-terms-of-service-27496894f6de
the (very short) twitter thread: https://twitter.com/cfiesler/status/1246111542736596994

Cheers!

Casey

—
Casey Fiesler
Assistant Professor
Department of Information Science
University of Colorado Boulder

www.caseyfiesler.com<http://www.caseyfiesler.com>
@cfiesler