the data wars Pt. 3

Let’s be clear about this: designing the open social Web has nothing to do with encouraging users to violate the TOS of another Web service. Putting users in control of (and teaching them to take responsibility for) their own data and giving them the tools and contextual prompts to do the right thing has nothing to do with duping them into letting you run a scraping script for your own benefit. It’s time to stop looking the other way when it comes to this practice and note that your short term gains (in terms of new users, better meshed users, etc.) come with some high prices in the long run.

like it matters