Yang Jie and Liza Lin report:
A Chinese software developer trawled Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. ’s popular Taobao shopping website for eight months, clandestinely collecting more than 1.1 billion pieces of user information before Alibaba noticed the scraping, a Chinese court verdict said.
The software developer began using web-crawling software he designed on Taobao’s site starting in November 2019, gathering information including user IDs, mobile-phone numbers and customer comments, according to a verdict released this month by a district court in China’s central Henan province.
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