Comment by candiddevmike 3 days ago
Don't take this the wrong way, but this is the kind of unethical behavior that our industry should frown upon IMO. I view this kind of thing on the same level as DDoS-as-a-Service companies.
I wish your company the kind of success it deserves.
Depends on the use case. Lots of hospitals and banks use RPA to automate routine processes on their EHRs and systems of record, because these kinds of software typically don't have APIs available. Or if they do, they're very limited.
Playwright and other browser automation scripts are a much more powerful version of RPA but they do require some knowledge of code. But there are more and more developers every year and code just gets more powerful every year. So I think it's a good bet to make that browser automation in code will replace RPA altogether some day.
Many times it is scraping aggregators of data that those aggregators also did not pay for.
Why is it unethical when courts have repeatedly affirmed browser automation to be legal and permitted?
If anything, it's unethical for companies to dictate how their customers can access services they've already paid for. If I'm paying hundreds of thousands per year for software, shouldn't I be allowed to build automations over it? Instead, many enterprise products go to great lengths to restrict this kind of usage.
I led the team that dealt with DDoS and other network level attacks at Robinhood so I know how harmful they are. But I also got to see many developers using our services in creative ways that could have been a whole new product (example: https://github.com/sanko/Robinhood).
Instead we had to go after these people and shut them down because it wasn't aligned with the company's long term risk profile. It sucked.
That's why we're focused on authenticated agents for B2B use cases, not the kind of malicious bots you might be thinking of.