HN is hypocritical - most commenters here are against this because "Meta bad," but at the same time, most commenters wouldn't want their posts shared privately amongst friends to be scraped and made available publicly.
> most commenters wouldn't want their posts shared privately amongst friends to be scraped and made available publicly.
Where's the "posts shared privately amongst friends made public" part? There are two cases here:
1. A service that logs in as the customer (who voluntarily provide their credentials) and scrapes information visible to said customer on their behalf. Nothing about "made available publicly" is alleged.
2. An individual using a pool of bot accounts to scrape posts visible to any logged in user. Nothing about "shared privately" is alleged. To be clear I don't like the method, but I'll also have to admit I've used one of the Instagram "clone sites" in the past thanks to their login wall.
Unless I missed something, it sounds like you just made it up.
For that to happen, one of your friends would have had to willingly allow this tool to scrape their social network, which would include your private posts.
As many other people, you are calling something “private” when it is not.
“Privately shared with friends” used to mean that only you and your friends know something. You don't “share” anything with “friends” on a social network. You give the information to a giant corporation. If it finds it suitable, it then delivers it to other users, but only after it records your location, analyzes the content to check if you were, say, affected by some melodramatic event (and therefore should be tricked into spending more time… I mean, get “personal recommendations” for a certain kind of content), and does a billion other things.
If you consider that this is fine, please relay all your conversations with family and friends through me from now on. I offer secure, reliable, fast, yada yada communication service. And it's hip! Ask anyone on the street what they use.
There are two cases they brought up, one being web scraping and the other is making a clone website publicly displaying content from Instagram.
I think Meta might be mixing up these two cases here on purpose to make it look like web scraping is as bad as stealing photos to publish it on a clone website.
Where's the "posts shared privately amongst friends made public" part? There are two cases here:
1. A service that logs in as the customer (who voluntarily provide their credentials) and scrapes information visible to said customer on their behalf. Nothing about "made available publicly" is alleged.
2. An individual using a pool of bot accounts to scrape posts visible to any logged in user. Nothing about "shared privately" is alleged. To be clear I don't like the method, but I'll also have to admit I've used one of the Instagram "clone sites" in the past thanks to their login wall.
Unless I missed something, it sounds like you just made it up.