The users agreed to share their data with everyone that uses Instagram. Because that's how the site works.

There’s an important difference between technically consenting and informed consent.

Given what I know about the bot problem on Instagram, I would imagine many people have been tricked into sharing their private profiles with scraping bots. Many bots are copying real people’s profiles and then spamming their friends with follow requests. It’s highly effective and gives these bots access to private profiles.

Fooling people is fraudulent, period.

The user agreed in facebook to have is data "public", so it can't complain that a robot scrap it.

Nothing prevents him to restrict access to his pages an data to "trusted" friends.

The description in the article sounds like it scrapes private profile data.

> Octopus designed the software to scrape data accessible to the user when logged into their accounts

Were they showing the private data to everyone, or just to the person whose account was used for the scraping? If it’s the latter, then this is also not a crime, it is just someone accessing data they have been authorized to access, but in an automated way.

I don't think so, it is more like you scrape what is accessible to this user. So in the end you will scrape your friends data. This is why I said that you are free to only share with friends that 'you trust'.

That is a very good point, but surely it was taken into consideration when scraping was declared legal?

All that case says is "scraping is not a violation of the CFAA". But of course the scraped data still exists in legal limbo; maybe you can compute derived information from it, but the moment a scraper reproduces it there is all of copyright law waiting for them.

In that case, the user owns the copyright, not the company, as the user is the author. So it would be up to them to take legal action if deemed necessary.