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> Are you trying to say it's morally wrong to read data made publicly available through a site's API? I think that's a stretch. Clearly there are very obviously malevolent things you could do with data acquired with such queries, but just iterating on a URL query string seems pretty far from an obvious moral wrong. I used to think this. But I changed my opinion and yes, in this particular instance, it's pretty much unambiguously morally wrong. Why did I change my opinion? Because the previous one was wrong (morally). Ethics isn't rocket science or brain surgery. Well, maybe a little like brain surgery. I could download that data and IMO, it'd be wrong to do so. I'm not always a good person, even by my own standards of ethics, so I might download that data. I wouldn't use the data maliciously because IMO that'd be even wronger (but by now why are you taking my word for this? I already violated my own ethical code once!). So all in all (if you take my word for it), the consequence of me downloading that data is strictly less bad than some malicious actor doing the same. I'm not really a big fan of Consequentialist Ethics. It's nice in theory (say, Utilitarianism), but in practice people simply have to use a derived code, which is not always as clearly defined. I like to keep my hypocrisies at surface-level. So I could do it, things would probably turn out right for everyone involved, but I'm not going to kid myself and tell myself it's not wrong to do so in the first place. (Also, there's the risk where having a copy of the data could mean I could lose control of it, fall into more malicious hands, and that'd be bad. Practical considerations I do not disagree with, but I should not need these to determine whether something is right or wrong) |