Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I'm pretty sure I have seen other apps do similar things. The data they are feeding them does seem to be mostly public data. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, or how outraged / surprised I should be.



Just because the data is public doesn't mean it can be easily accessed or aggregated en-masse for real time survellience.

If Geofeedia was only using public data, easily available to anyone else, then Twitter and Facebook wouldn't have been able to cut off their access.


"Public data" doesn't mean easily accessible.

Twitter sells access to their data. They can cancel that account, but the data is still public. Without the access contract it is inconvenient and against the terms of service to access in bulk.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: