Is it possible that they offloaded the scraping to a different company to avoid direct litigation now theyre out in the open? To say โwe didnโt scrape your website, and you canโt prove it.โ
Like DDG, Ecosia, Qwant use Bing for their data Or how feds buy data from data brokers. Outsource the dirty job like every tech company does and shift the blame if caught doing something unlawful.
It seems they are trying to garner some positive PR after they scraped through everything without anyone noticing.
I absolutely believe a lot of companies outsource simply because they donโt want to build an internal organ to do it. Even in government, despite what Conservatives believe, most organization heads are pretty focused on core competency and press to use outsourced resources. This latter also promoted by heavy lobbying by the companies selling the services.
This is a situation of โnever attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity.โ Sure, some are motivated by malice or subterfuge, but most are probably just buying services because they have other things theyโd rather focus on.
Why would they be concerned about litigation? As far as I know, scraping is completely legal in most/all countries (including the US, which Iโm more familiar with and theyโre headquartered out of), as long as youโre respecting copyright and correctly handling PII (which they claim to be making an effort on).
