I understand that the HN crowd is composed of many different people with radically different interests and opinions, so an "average HN opinion" would be mostly meaningless, but still...

I find it mildly amusing that HN both loudly complains about bots scraping their websites AND is very interested in user privacy.

The conflicting part is that user privacy automatically means that you cede any control over how exactly does the user accesses your resource. Whether they use a web browser or an automated scraper. Any attempt to analyze requests to tie different requests made by the same actor together automatically means privacy violation.

I don't have a good answer to this dilemma yet, I just thought that this is a curious observation and wanted to share.

On the face, yes, that is true. And it's what confused me about your post at first. Because I didn't see the connect between scraping and user privacy.

And yes, on the face, being able to determine whether a bot or a person is looking at your site is essentially trying to confirm some private information about the consumer.

But I think the dichotomy can be settled through the habits of consumption. Bots are impartial, greedy, and fast. They can consume resources faster than a human can. This could be a problem when trying to provide those same resources to humans.

Not to mention, the bots doing the scraping are doing so to put your content in their regurgitation machine. Which has been ruled as "not a copyright violation" due to "reasons". Whereas, a person who attempts to use your content without permission is liable for violating your copyright.

Now, if the position is "human users" have privacy, then we would need that critical piece of information before we decide whether to grant privacy to an entity. Also, the user is free to not use the resource if the rule is that we're allowed to determine whether they are human and the user doesn't want to share that information. As long as we don't pursue that information beyond what we've stated we're going to use it for, we can be said to be respecting the users' privacy. Also, if we don't disclose that information to other users or companies, we could still be said to be respecting the users' privacy, because information shared in confidence with us remains that way.

Um, no.

Scrapers and bots put a ton of effort into anti-fingerprinting. Ordinary users? Zero.

Users care mainly about cross-site fingerprinting. Bot-fighting is concerned with single-site fingerprinting.

The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments.

Also, this article commits the common mistake of assuming that privacy means hiding in the largest possible cohort. That's bogus. You can also get privacy by belonging to many one-member cohorts -- i.e. fingerprint uniquely but differently to each site you visit and differently to a single site over longer timespans (like weeks). This is precisely what Brave's "farbling" does; farbled users have very unique fingerprints and yet they can't be tracked.