The FBI uses third-party companies like SocialGist to scrape data from various websites, often without the site's consent.
SocialGist's BoardReader was scraping content from different fediverse instances and misattributing it, leading to issues like the FBI wrongly attributing a post to FSE.
There were technical challenges and evasions involved in preventing BoardReader's unauthorized scraping activities.
Concerns about data privacy and government surveillance were highlighted due to these incidents.
The case involved exchanges with the FBI regarding threats which were falsely attributed to FSE due to data mismanagement by scrapers.
BoardReader's activities seemed linked to providing data to platforms like Facebook, which was then available to the FBI.
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