What the shit happened to freedom of information act? Now we not only have to sacrifice our privacy to some 3rd party contractor but I must also create a fucking account in order to access information our government provides? Fuck that shit. I’m just guna make a throwaway account. Scrape the fucking site dry and upload the shit to my own website. Fuck them.
On one hand, I realize that the office may be required by law to restrict certain information, so I see why they may need to know with certainty who they’re giving it to.
On the other hand, all of that user account info is going straight to Elon Musk on January 20th, so I agree that it sucks.
Why would “free US trade and tariff data” have any legitimate need for that?
I was also thinking this could also be contesting the legislation for the freedom of information act by requiring a citizen of the US to own or possess a computer, smart phone or email address. The dept that runs FOIL offers the ability to request information by phone or email whereas this site does not. But I haven’t looked into any of this so I’m prolly 100% wrong. I don’t even remember if FOIL is federal or NY state ran program.
It is really frustrating to me that data which is supposedly public cannot be simply downloaded all together as a large dataset, instead you have to go through a convoluted process to access only a narrow subset of it