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by bkor 1778 days ago
From the Keepa addon settings:

> Allow the add-on to gather Amazon prices to improve our price data

I thought it was common knowledge that Keepa uses the addon to gather prices. Though with GDPR it probably needs to be more explicitly said.

2 comments

There is a difference between gathering prices and loading extra URLs to gather those prices. From that text, I would not assume they are using my computer as a part of a botnet.
I knew it was doing that as well (the distributed scraping the article talks about). But I cannot figure out where I read it. Maybe they used to have it somewhere on their site, and now it's gone?

What is strange that people asked for e.g. Amazon.nl support. This isn't implemented as Keepa relies on Amazon (this is their answer in the forums). But if they scrape, why do they still need Amazon?

Note: I am the author of the article above.

Nice, I didn’t find this setting and I explicitly went looking for it. So the settings in the “price history” graph don’t merely apply to the way this graph is shown. Now I need to figure out what this setting is doing. Because I didn’t see any conditions in the code which were tied to this setting.

Found it. This is the optOut_crawl setting and its handling is entirely on the server side. So presumably if this setting is set, the server will no longer send the extension any instructions to scrape Amazon pages in background. Mind you, it still could but it probably won’t.

Scraping data from pages you visit shouldn’t be affected by this.