Timeline for A Terms of Service update restricting companies that scrape your profile information without your permission
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
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| Jun 3, 2020 at 13:30 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Jun 27, 2019 at 14:48 | comment | added | Please stop being evil | So, if you send a single email in this way, there's no way to show you violated TOS. The TOS says you can't use "the Network or the Service" to send unsolicited emails. Proving that you did that when you looked up a single email address from a profile page as a long-time user who regularly visits profile pages without emailing people is essentially impossible. Using your reputation on SO to make the email more legit is also not prohibited, because your information you can consent to release/use. | |
| Jun 5, 2017 at 23:38 | comment | added | Joe R. | +1, Brad's points are realistic and very compelling. | |
| Jan 6, 2017 at 5:32 | comment | added | Diminutive Colossus | I think the idea is that they aren't going to use this to actively stop you from doing anything where you wouldn't have been actively stopped previously. They are going to use it to ignore the people who complain about being actively stopped from doing shady things. Is it against the ToS? I'm sure countless people smarter than me could argue just as convincingly for as against that. Is anyone going to put any effort into stopping you from doing what you describe in your answer? That is very unlikely. They're doing this to save man hours, not spend more. | |
| Jun 26, 2016 at 18:24 | comment | added | Brad | @jerry The issue I'm getting at is that people won't provide consent for this. They won't even know about it. This is a policy change only, and doesn't provide a checkbox that says, "Yes, people can contact me." I would argue that the very fact that you're publicly sharing your e-mail address should be that consent. Sharing your e-mail address publicly is optional, and serves no other purpose other than to allow you to be contacted. | |
| Jun 20, 2016 at 16:29 | comment | added | Pete855217 | The OP's use of SO to communicate with other profiles is so obscure, and presumably rare that I don't think it warrants cancelling the new policy. It's a humanist thing (benefit to the most people etc.), and I'd argue you can use other sites to do the contacting you need to do. | |
| Apr 21, 2016 at 19:29 | comment | added | jerry | For those considering emailing a single person or small group of people about a commercial opportunity, as you describe, it's not at all unreasonable to read his or her profile to see if consent was given. I am not a lawyer, but I'd argue that's not unsolicited and hence not prohibited by the ToS. Those who are emailing many people, to the point that it's inconvenient to read their profiles, are by definition bulk emailers. They are doing it wrong. | |
| Apr 21, 2016 at 15:47 | comment | added | Betty Mock | I see a big difference between "scraping" and personally going through profiles to see if someone matches a job need you have. If you send one email to someone you personally picked out why is that spam? | |
| Apr 6, 2016 at 12:51 | comment | added | Fattie | This answer is obviously correct. SO is a advertising agency. It is nothing more than an ad agency. If you take every single quark composing every single being who founded, runs or works at SO, what you have is "advertising". Every single person at SO and every system at SO is "advertising". That's all it is. And theres nothing wrong with that. What's with the weird self-hate towards "spam" (aka "advertising"). | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 16:20 | comment | added | Brad | @Magisch That's your opinion and you already control your info. Don't publish your e-mail address. Nothing else needs to be done. Also, if you do ever receive an e-mail you think is spam, I bet your e-mail client has a spam button to help train your spam filter. I think you're wrong too about folks thinking all messages about jobs/projects are spam because almost all of the few people I've contacted have replied positively. Even if you were right about the broader audience not wanting to be contacted, the policy damages everyone and is too broad. Don't publish what you don't want out there. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 9:20 | comment | added | Magisch | The recruiters that are currently using SO profiles to aquire leads on candidates are imo all spammers and need to be dealt with harshly. SO is not and should not be used like linked in and especially not without my expressed consent. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 9:19 | comment | added | Magisch | Why do you presume that I would even want for SO to be used as a recruiting tool outside of the available normal channels? Contacting people via email even for a "small project" is already against the current ToS, and I would consider that spamming. I (and I assume the majority of devs here) do not use SO as a linked-in like way to get my name out. I don't believe there is a critical mass of people okay with that so that SO should allow it by default. | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 19:38 | history | edited | Brad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 42 characters in body
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| Mar 27, 2016 at 6:59 | comment | added | Brad | @wythagoras I think that satisfies the requirements in the ToS, but not the usage in practice. Without some sort of standard opt-in checkbox or something that prompts users to choose to opt-in to share information, I think that almost nobody will add such a sentence. If almost nobody does, then I think that recruiters will stop using profile information as a source since they will almost never actually be able to use it. | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 6:56 | comment | added | wythagoras | Why doesn't a simple sentence in the About Me section satisfy? | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 6:54 | comment | added | Brad | @wythagoras According to the comments on the main post, Stack Exchange is providing no standardized way to provide explicit permission to allow someone to contact me. Therefore, no one will use it. Perhaps this can all be resolved by simply saying, "if you list your e-mail address as public, you agree that people can e-mail you". | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 6:41 | comment | added | wythagoras | Also, regarding: If you don't want someone to have your e-mail address, don't publish your e-mail address.. There are problems where people who didn't publish their e-mail address were mailed anyway, because the e-mail address can be found through Gravatar. See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44717/… | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 6:35 | comment | added | wythagoras | For your information, the part: Under no circumstances will Subscriber use the Network or the Service to (a) send unsolicited e-mails… is already present in the current ToS. The one you agreed to comply with. Also, you can specifically allow them to send you emails: [...] without explicit permission from [...] or the user. | |
| Mar 27, 2016 at 4:29 | history | answered | Brad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |