Closed januarionclx closed 3 years ago
mezacchann
commented
5 years ago I don't think request-spamming other company's servers is a good idea for a business venture. That journey can get you into trouble really quickly. At best you can get your ip banned, but being a founder myself, I can assure you they'll try to identify your business and pursue you in court.
januarionclx
commented
5 years ago Thank you so much for the response!
I highly appreciate the warning and feedback.
I do agree that you have to be somewhat careful about the limits, but are you really breaking them?
The API is public. You're not causing physical harm either, unless it becomes as you said, spam, which you can prevent by limiting the requests, to a threshold that's allowed by them.
If you're not using the API (as we would, if we stick to the context of this conversation, project and issue) it's certainly a much more delicate subject, but it could still be legal.
Good examples of this are huge companies like jungle scout (the #1 product research tool in Amazon).
Other companies (like Instagram data-tracking tools) also limit their requests (by charging $ per data report, for example, which is a practice I'd recommend).
I'd like to understand the implications of the later, as unlike the Amazon's case, I don't know the implications of these.
Good examples of these - as a case study - are igstats or hashtastic.
I'd love to continue the conversation but it could also switch the subject unintendedly somewhere else, so creating a new issue could be a good idea, I really don't know, but I would also like to maintain the question about this API's acceptable, legal, and technical request rate limitations for when we're not using the antispam parameters open and fresh, apart from the new 'how legal doing business around this' issue that we brought!
januarionclx
commented
5 years ago That's quite a bit outside the scope of this issue, check the discussion at #9 for some hints about it.
CesarIAndrade
commented
5 years ago I tried to obtain the followers from a tiktok user, but i don´t how after (i don´t know) the request failed, then i tried to do that again and the api gave a null object as response
Archiolidius
commented
4 years ago @januarionclx I do not have a lot of knowledge on this subject but here is my opinion: 1) This is an unofficial API. TikTok does not have an open API. So most likely using this API is against their TOS. 2) They must have protection from bots and scrapers. There is no way you can do hundreds of thousands of requests under one account in a short period of time. 3) What companies do in such cases: block your account -> if you continue they block IP -> if you continue again they will sue you or your company (of course only if you are doing millions of requests daily and it has significant effects on their infrastructure). At least I heard such stories from people who were developing Instagram and FB automation tools.
CarsterX
commented
4 years ago how do we get the anti spam params burp the app or ?
Hello Steffan, I've seen your Tik Tok acc before and I would just ask why tf you are being such a jerk. You should get the ban hammer!
szdc
commented
3 years ago Closing as this project is no longer maintained.
Hey guys!,
Before continuing with the question I'd like to stop and take a moment to first congratulate and appreciate the work that @szdc has done for us.
His work is inspiring and beautiful, he not only reverse-engineered the whole thing, but he wrote an article explaining it all, and yes, he had fun with it, but you have to applaud when people have fun creating, understanding, teaching and helping others too and he wrote an entire, well-engineered API for us to use, how cool is that?
I see a lot of controversy regarding the anti-spam parameters, I understand your frustrations, but none of those can be brought to the subject, this IS indeed a very educational project, both for him and us.
Following this trend, I've been doing a lot of data-gathering myself in the past days, it's been really entertaining and educational for me too! couldn't have thought of a better way of spending this free time that I got.
This week I started learning about Instagram and TikTok, already built multiple scripts for Instagram and was surprised by how little decent apps there are, and would like to start exploring TikTak too.
My intention is to produce insights that are not easily available to the consumer both for my own curiosity and marketing purposes.
The list goes on and on, moving to hashtags exploring, trend analysis, etc.
As you can see this has 0 to do with automation, but these are A LOT of requests being made to the server for every question you want to answer (like, ordering your followers by their follower count requires you to request their profile too - at least in Instagram - meaning that if someone has 1M followers, that's 1M request!).
As an 'average user' of this API that has no knowledge of Java or Android apps, I will most likely NOT have access to the anti-spam parameters in the short run and I was wondering how viable would it still be for me (and users like me) to use this API for such purposes.
We do not have access to Robots.txt but I believe that this is public information (data) and that we should be able to gather and organize it our own way, and that we can turn this into services and applications for doing such work.
I could do the testing myself, which I did and will continue doing updating the thread with my own case-studies, but I thought opening the thread could benefit others too and shortcut my path to the answer because it would be really discouraging if we do a test (let's say, 100.000 requests) getting a false-positive of "It's possible!" just to realize that we'll get IP-blocked after the 150.000 request which is why I thought opening the thread would be much more beneficial for us all.
Have fun learning! and thanks again for the project.