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Beryllium Sphere (r) [soylentnews.org] writes:

If you've ever wanted to consolidate your social media accounts, Power Ventures offered a way. With your permission, they'd log into your social media accounts and automatically collect data from them.

As Captain Reynolds said, the world is full of middlemen and they don't like to be bypassed. Facebook blocked Power's IP addresses and then sued under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/ [washingtonpost.com] for a lawyer's dissection of the 9th Circuit's opinion that Power did violated the CFAA and https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/12/13-17102.pdf [uscourts.gov] for the text of the opinion.

This was a lawsuit, not a criminal case. Imagine, though, an overzealous Federal prosecutor looking for a way to wreck someone's life. Trying a business model that Facebook doesn't like could, under this ruling, leave you with a felony record if it got pursued as a criminal case.

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