Why would you do this without knowing whether or not Amazon would let yours their data? If Amazon doesn't provide an API, then they probably don't want their data accessible to other companies.
Why should Amazon have the right
not to let you do so? Those reviews are effectively advertising, which is governed by a mountain of law about false advertising, because advertising speech is highly non-protected. Amazon should not have any legal standing for refusing to allow
anyone to analyze whether their glorified advertising is, in fact, false.
Furthermore, even if that were not the case, it does not appear to violate Amazon's policies. I just looked at their Terms of Use on the Amazon.com site. At no point do they say anything at all about using automated tools to
scrape their content en masse,
much less say anything about using automated tools built into a web browser to analyze what you're
actively looking at.
So:
- This clearly isn't an acceptable use issue, because Amazon's policies don't prohibit it.
- This clearly isn't a copyright issue, because any content that they are copying is not owned by Amazon, but rather by the original poster, and was created for public consumption under a presumptively gratis/libre license.
- Amazon's behavior in this area violates the public interest in numerous ways.
- This does appear to violate Apple's rules, because unless I'm missing something huge, they never needed Amazon's permission to do what they did in the first place.
This has nothing to do with following the rules, and everything to do with Amazon not liking being called out for their failure to keep their house in order, and being a big enough company to bully Apple into silencing fair criticism. Apple should have had big enough breeches to say no. Shame on Apple.
But the biggest problem here is that Amazon has a strong conflict of interest. They benefit greatly from those fake reviews, so they don't *want* them to go away. And then they take advantage of every little angle they can come up with to silence anyone who points out that Amazon reviews are just barely above the level of garbage. That's just unacceptable behavior for a major company.
I hope this company lawyers up and sues Amazon and Apple jointly for conspiracy to commit mass fraud, and I trust that the next time the Senate looks into Amazon for antitrust violations, this company will testify. It's time to separate the review system from their sales platform, so that no one company has too much power.
My purchases on Amazon are a fraction of what they were 2 years ago. B&H for cameras. Apple & B&H for computing. Manufacturers online sales for a surprisingly wide variety of purchases. I now get out and visit the Home Depots and shopping malls I had abandoned. I’m sick and tired of cheap junk sold on Amazon, at times wildly inflated prices, fake products, fake reviews and crappy marketplace vendors.
Likewise. When I realized that people were buying all the paper towels and toilet paper at Walmart, then scalping them on Amazon for 10x the price, that's when I realized Amazon had completely lost control of its marketplace. I still buy some things on Amazon either because I can't get them elsewhere or because I don't trust the return policies of random minor web stores, but I've spent more money in the last year at Apple and B&H than Amazon by a factor of ten or so. (I still buy from Adorama through Amazon, because I'm lazy.)
