Hey Habr! Today I would like to talk about ethics, namely ethics in the professional field. It will be a question of services that perform 'fake' (automated human-like) activity and of those doubts in which they can result both the ordinary ordinary user, and the professional of development sphere.
So, let's start. What I mean by the phrase «fake activity» is not difficult to guess: it is the manipulation and compromising of the data that are responsible for the indicator of your activity, or more simply, of actions on the Internet. With this, of course, every one of you who used social networks at least once came across: Facebook, Instagram, and so on.
I will describe this scheme on the example of Instagram: each person has his own account, and for developers API access is provided. And what did we do? We started to launch bots that can perform all sorts of activity through a person’s account (such as like, subscribe, comment on other people's posts, or even independently manage their (or owners) page, for example @neuralcat ). And soon this opportunity began to be actively used in the business sphere. Attracting a new audience by targeting according to certain criteria and carrying out activity on their page. Everything would be fine, but over time it went beyond all limits. Every day dozens of incomprehensible accounts like your photos, leave spam comments, tag you on advertising posts and so on.
Bot activity has gone beyond all limits of prudence that today Instagram closes its API, and here is one of the reasons: “Most of the services that work with auto-posting, likes and OML-like likes — do it through private api — login / password, but not through the official API.” Читать полностью »
