Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Automated deep linking

Author:Patrick Breitenbach
Posted:9/1/1999; 12:25:05 PM
Topic:Automated deep linking
Msg #:10419
Prev/Next:10417 / 10420

I tend to agree that automated deep linking, while providing a valuable service, is a stretch in terms of respecting content author copyrights. I think scraped sites would have a legitimate concern about it.

I think it goes further than the home page, however. VerticalOne's new service has gotten surprising little criticism for the very slippery slope that it presents.

The service, which is actually sort of neat, requests the account numbers, IDs and PWs of your bank, brokerage, credit card, frequent flyer, email etc. accounts and uses this information to "screen scrape" your account information from the respective web sites. It then, after presumably storing it unencrypted on its servers, reformats its for display on the user's consolidated account view.

The legal, copyright, privacy, infomration security, etc. issues seem astounding. I reckon they're relying on stealth at this point to gain some momentum before the big companies figure out what's going on and that it devestates all of their customer data stewardship and copyright policies.

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