Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse

Amazon's cloud arm is investigating Perplexity AI for potential violations of its web services rules, the e-commerce giant told Wired. The startup, backed by Jeff Bezos' family fund and Nvidia, allegedly scraped websites that had explicitly forbidden such access.

Earlier this month, WIRED uncovered evidence of Perplexity using an unmarked IP address to bypass restrictions on major news sites. The company's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, claimed a third-party contractor was responsible but declined to name them.

The whole internet is becoming a botnet

[xack]

Thanks to so called "residential proxies" ip addresses can come from all over the world and there is no way to block them. Malware developers sell them for profit, and other scrapers and spam posters use them to bypass IP bans. Banning by IP is no longer effective thanks to them since they can spin out another router exploit and get another million ips. I'm glad i don't work for cybersecurity, as the internet has cyber covid now. I've given up on cloud back ups and returned to trusty sneakernet.

So-called 'AI' is a CANCER

[Anonymous Coward]

..and it's metasticizing.

CEO clears this up

[ThumpBzztZoom]

From another article (https://www.fastcompany.com/91144894/perplexity-ai-ceo-aravind-srinivas-on-plagiarism-accusations)"

“Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it,” said Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas in a phone interview Friday. “I think there is a basic misunderstanding of the way this works,” Srinivas said. “We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”

He's right, there was a basic misunderstanding. They're not stealing content and then lying about it, they're paying someone else to steal the content so they can then lie about it.

That makes it all better, glad he could clear this up.

Corporations' Favorite Scapegoat

[organgtool]

"Third-party contractor" is quickly surpassing "rogue engineer" for the top spot of corporations' favorite scapegoat.

Re: Corporations' Favorite Scapegoat

[TigerPlish]

Always was. Long-standing way of shielding the company from repercussions.

Anything good...

[groobly]

...must be extirpated.

they're your agent

[HiThere]

If they're a "third party contractor" they're acting as your agent, so you are responsible.