Legal and ethics questions about a service that uses scrapping / bot
Hi,
I am working on a prototype of a service that charges customers to send them SMS messages when online applications are open for an administrative procedure in France ( opennings are rare ).
To get availibity, i am developping a "scrapper" / "bot"
What do you think about this service in terms of legal and ethics ?
I run a similar service. Started just over two months ago, so it's likely I don't know more than you do.
Legally, you want to find every Terms and Conditions related to every part of the service and go over it. In my case, the service doesn't appear to be illegal.
Ethically, I don't believe I'm doing a bad thing. I provide a well-priced service that provides people an opportunity to get access to what they didn't have access to. After reading the letters and messages from customers, I feel like I'm in the side of angels.
What makes me think it’s OK is that i am not scrapping to copy content, i am just going through a form to chek if slots are available to apply.
Would love to chat and compare notes.
What do you think?
Let me preface this by saying that I do not know anything about French laws. I live in the U.S. But if I had to bet, I think that it will turn out to be illegal. In the U.S., and I have seen similar businesses shut down.
It doesn't really matter what we think. It matters what they think. Read their terms of service. If they say "dont scrape us", then you have two options:
I have chosen option 1 in the past and my projects have been too small (~$500 MRR) to warrant attention. If you choose option 1, I would also suggest thinking of a medium-long term plan to eliminate this business risk in the event you do see success.
I know at least one company built on scraping Amazon which went out of business because Amazon removed the content this company relied on.
Good luck.