Look at what Google's doing right now with Chrome. On June 30 Chrome will remove the last flag that let uBlock keep working, and there's no workaround. Google says it's about security and performance, but is it? $239 billion in ad revenue last year seems to be the motivational factor. The "restriction" is a rule written by the company that profits when you can't block its ads, dressed up as protecting you. But... CISA recommends ad blockers as a defense against malware spread through ad networks.
The rules aren't always right and sometimes have unintended consequences. I think a bigger issue than Browser Use is all of the copyrighted material in every LLM. Given that precedent has been set with zero legal consequences, I'm not sure there's much of a leg for you to stand on here.
Was Rosa Parks unethical for sitting down on a bus?
The point is that the context matters: both the users context and the context of the restriction. It’s not as clear cut as “ignoring restrictions = bad”.
The restriction itself can be unethical, in the same way that bypassing a restriction can be unethical.
> As a discussion regarding if it’s ethical to ignore restrictions progresses, the probability of someone bringing up a famous case where someone ignored unethical restrictions approaches one
Seems reasonable to me. Substitute Rosa parks with another example of unethical restrictions if you wish - there are many.
Do you think it is a problem that someone said it's always unethical to violate a restrictions, and someone else brought up Rosa Parks?
I propose a new law myself: as an online discussion gets longer, the probability of someone trying to defeat an argument by stating that it mentioned Rosa Parks or Hitler without engaging with the substance of that argument approaches one.
There are many ethical reasons to bypass restrictions. Colloquially, we just call them exceptions.
There are many valid ethical exceptions for evading anti-bot detections. For example: you are a white hat actor scraping a black hat site. There are hundreds of other plausible examples.
If the sign says 1 per person, the reason it's unethical to take more than 1 isn't because you're disobeying a sign - it's because someone else might not be able to get one, and the sign is indicating to you this is likely to be a problem. If the store is about to throw out all the unsold ones in 5 minutes, then ignoring the sign is completely ethical.
The rules aren't always right and sometimes have unintended consequences. I think a bigger issue than Browser Use is all of the copyrighted material in every LLM. Given that precedent has been set with zero legal consequences, I'm not sure there's much of a leg for you to stand on here.