Is it ethical or legal for companies to scrape GitHub stars for spam purposes?

3 points by elbrian 4y ago ↗ HN

Just got an email from jack.flynn@gatsbyjs.com with some spam and he mentioned that he got my information from the stargazers list of the Gatsby repo.

Is this something I should bother reporting to GitHub? I will likely never star another repo again because it's been proven to be a good source of spam.

2 comments

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sarcasmatwork 4y ago ↗

Have you looked thru the TOS?

https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

verdverm 4y ago ↗

I have started thousands of repos only a handful have ever reached out directly. I get more spam from people finding my repos and trying to sell me something. So I wouldn't write off stars yet, though given the GitHub timeline "spam" from staring repos...

YMMV