this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
54 points (87.5% liked)

Technology

63897 readers
6506 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

tldr- Using the robots meta element or HTTP header to say that content of this page should not be used for machine learning, in case some actors make their search UA indistinguishable from their machine learning efforts.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

solve anything.

As I say, honourable UAs will honour robots.txt and its protocol, this proposal is an extension of that.

Google have been proposing similar. Perhaps presumably for different reasons: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/public_comment_thought_starters_oct23.pdf

There is no accountability.

On small scales perhaps not, but as said this has always been the case with scraping.

Unless some law is enacted,

robots.txt protocols has never been law but has been honoured so it's worth hanging on to. It's still the defintion of 'good bots' vs 'bad bots' on one level and that's about as good as site owners have vs whack-a-mole with UA-IP variations.