[…] a group of academic researchers and journalists is suing the government, challenging the constitutionality of part of CFAA. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, they’re targeting the portion of the law that makes it illegal to break private companies’ terms of service […]
[…] although [those terms] are an individual’s agreement with a company, CFAA makes violating them a federal crime. […]
The four professors bringing the lawsuit are conducting research into racial and other discriminatory biases in online services.
[…] they’re creating an army of fake profiles and tweaking them to look like they belong to a diverse set of people. But using that tactic—one that’s very popular among researchers—could make the professors felons: The terms of most online services, including the largest employment and housing-search websites, prohibit creating multiple profiles, falsifying profile information, and scraping publicly available information with automated scripts.