Quote from: hacker1001101001 on January 13, 2020, 07:58:10 AM

Quote from: Quickseller on January 13, 2020, 05:19:20 AM

Who knows how much additional data certain people has on forum users, probably a decent amount, and probably enough to make a lot of people uncomfortable if they knew exactly what was being collected on them by third parties, even if the information is public.

I am sure if it continues this way one day it would be out of theymos hand's to control the amount of misuse of this data, as it is already been violating the main reason behind the implementations of some systems like trust list for example, mostly it begin as being something very private for users to make there own judgement but making it public just induced more drama. Even merit sources which were to be hidden for not being bitched for merits are now easily accessible to anyone who wants to hunt some.

If the this type of excessive scraping would not be curbed or handled now, than it would already be too late.

I dont doubt the information is already being misused.

The thing is that the people who are spying on forum members dont reasonably own the data they are collecting. Ditto for those who are scraping posts and other information. So I dont think it would be fair for these people to make the decision to disclose or not.

Most of the time when a third party adds some additional functionality to a social media platform, they connect via API and only request the specific information needed to display the additional information to their user. It is unusual for a third party to have their own database of information they display.

When someone posts on the forum, they are making the informed implicit decision to trust theymos with various information. With so many people spying on forum members and scraping various information from the forum, their information is being given to people they dont necessarily trust and probably arent aware their information is being collected by these people.