Comment by jasonwcfan
Comment by jasonwcfan 3 days ago
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.
> they've already paid for.
That is the crux, rarely is it a service being scraped that they paid for