Such companies are already going to far greater extents to scrape anything resembling contact information (without really caring about false positives etc since as your quotes point out quantity is their game) from text, HTML etc on the web using text entity recognizers etc.
As long as you only markup already public information with hCard (or any other microformat), the effect is negligible on such companies, while it enables and benefits users and developers of user-centric apps, thus providing a net positive effect. Tantek -----Original Message----- From: "Samuel Richter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:48:38 To: Microformats Discuss<[email protected]> Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] hCard slowing adoption of microformats? How's this...? Using gmail, I happened to spy a list of supported links, here's one of them: Custom Web Scraping Data Extraction & Mining Service Buy up to 20,000 Records for $75.00 RightHandMarketingManagement.com This reinforces the seriousness of the issue in my mind. If hCards are used as indiscriminately as the data in these websites, it would just pipeline the same information to companies of this ilk. -Sam On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:45 AM, David Janes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Samuel Richter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> I read some blog posts this morning on microformats and a common >> concern (and I feel a legitimate one) is the "scraping of hCard's from >> web sites for future generations of spammers." I believe that fear, >> if left unaddressed, will kill the microformat effort. Has there been >> any discussion of this? > > You weren't going to fill us in on the URLs, were you? > > > > -- > David Janes > Mercenary Programmer > http://code.davidjanes.com > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
