Comments on: Scrape anyone’s Twitter followers

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 15:12:51 +0000

Indeed, social network profiles are generally public data. You would easily see this if you’ve used a search engine, like Google or Bing, in the past decade.

Extracting the table of data in this format allows you to see additional details about Twitter followers that is public, but just not viewable on a single page within Twitter.

Keep up the good work!

By: Zarino Zappia

Zarino Zappia — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:33:13 +0000

Hi Martha! Generally our Twitter tools can only access data that's already public – eg: the follower lists which are accessible via the sidebar on each user's profile page. Twitter users who are worried about their privacy can set their profile to "Protected". Because our Twitter tools use the Twitter OAuth API, they cannot access the followers of a Protected profile, unless you yourself follow that profile. This is perfectly sensible – if you're able to see a person's followers, then so is the Get Twitter Followers tool under your control. In the end, however, we trust our users to act responsibly and within the law. If this topic interests you, you might want to read Francis' blog post about the legality of scraping from 2012.

By: Martha

Martha — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 12:13:29 +0000

You may think this is clever, but it is an invasion of people’s privacy and goes against every principle of every privacy legislation. This is the kind of behavior that hurts an entire industry.