- Stealth crawlers are automated tools that collect public web data anonymously; they are not nefarious but enable beneficial uses like investigative journalism, academic research, and cybersecurity.
- Anonymous crawling supports public-interest work, such as The Markup's investigation into Amazon's anti-competitive practices and ProPublica's revelation of price steering.
- New York's 'Stealth Crawler Protection Act' would make anonymous crawling of news sites illegal, allowing publishers to unmask crawlers without evidence of wrongdoing.
- Such legislation threatens the open web, user privacy, and valuable research, while failing to address the real problem of overaggressive crawling.
- Better solutions exist, such as technical measures that target harmful crawling conduct without impeding anonymous access to public information.