This ruling is really confusing for me. So I feel pretty strongly that what van Buren did is a massive abuse of authority and it warrants punishment. Yet so many people I usually agree with (SCOTUS judges, EFF, privacy lawyers) are all calling this a win.
Am I missing something? To me, this ruling means that if a person is granted technical access to a computer system, then that person cannot be held criminally liable for anything they do with access to that system, even if the owner explicitly prohibits it.
In other words, lets say I work at a gay hookup website and they grant me access to their production database as part of my job. If I start selling off information about user to third parties (say journalists), how can that be legal?
Aside, I do understand and agree with the argument allowing for spidering and screen scrapping. Like, if I buy a subscription to an online parts catalog, I should be able to use a bot to access that data in the same ways a human could.
Am I missing something? To me, this ruling means that if a person is granted technical access to a computer system, then that person cannot be held criminally liable for anything they do with access to that system, even if the owner explicitly prohibits it.
In other words, lets say I work at a gay hookup website and they grant me access to their production database as part of my job. If I start selling off information about user to third parties (say journalists), how can that be legal?
Aside, I do understand and agree with the argument allowing for spidering and screen scrapping. Like, if I buy a subscription to an online parts catalog, I should be able to use a bot to access that data in the same ways a human could.