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Having trouble marking an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccine? You’re not alone. To cope, some people are turning to bots that scan overcrowded websites and send social media alerts when the slots open.
They have helped older families find rare dates. But not all public health officials think it’s a good idea.
In rural Buckland, Mass., Two hours west of Boston, a vaccination clinic canceled a day’s appointment after learning outsiders had nearly all picked them up within a few minutes. minutes through a Twitter alert. In parts of New Jersey, health officials have added measures to block robots, which they say favors tech buffs.
WHAT IS A VACCINE BOT?
The robots – essentially stand-alone programs on the web – have arisen amid widespread frustration with the online world of vaccine appointments.
Although situations vary by state, people often have to check multiple vendor sites for available appointments. Weeks after rollout begins, demand for vaccines continues to outstrip supply, making it harder to find even for those who qualify, as they refresh dating sites to score a spot. When a coveted opening appears, many find that it can disappear halfway through the reservation.
The most notable bots crawl the websites of vaccine vendors for changes, which could mean a clinic is adding new appointments. Bots are often supervised by humans, who then post alerts about openings using Twitter or SMS notifications.
A second type that is more worrying for health officials is that of scalping robots that could automatically make appointments, potentially to offer them for sale. So far, there is little evidence that scalping robots book dates.
ARE BOT VACCINE ALERTS HELPING?
Yes, for the people who use them.
“THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I have a date with my father! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!” tweeted Benjamin Shover, of Stratford, New Jersey, after securing a March 3 date for his 70-year-old father using an alert from the @nj_vaccine Twitter account.
The success came a month after enrolling in the New Jersey State Online Vaccine Registry.
“He’s not really tech-savvy,” Shover said of his father in an interview. “He is also physically disabled and has arthritis, so it is difficult for him to find an appointment online.”
The creator of the robot, software engineer Kenneth Hsu, said his initial motivation was to help secure a date for his own in-laws. Now he and other volunteers have set a larger mission to help others who are excluded from New Jersey’s confusing online dating system.
“These are people who just want to know that they are on a list somewhere and that they are going to be helped,” Hsu said. “We want everyone to be vaccinated. We want to see our grandparents. “
WHAT DO HEALTH OFFICIALS THINK?
The robots have encountered resistance in some communities. A robot that alerted Massachusetts residents to a clinic this week in sparsely populated Franklin County has led many people in the Boston area to sign up for the slots. Local officials canceled all appointments, switched to a private system, and spread the word through high centers and city officials.
“Our goal was to help our residents get vaccinated,” said Tracy Rogers, emergency preparedness manager for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments. “But 95% of the dates we had were from outside Franklin County.”
The Union County of New Jersey put a CAPTCHA prompt in its planning system to confirm that visitors are human, blocking efforts to “play” with a robot, said Sebastian D’Elia, a county spokesperson. .
“When you post on Twitter, only a certain segment of society is going to see this,” he said. Even if they are trying to help someone else, D’Elia said others don’t have the luxury of people standing up for them.
But the person who created a robot that is now stranded in Union County, computer programmer Noah Marcus, 24, said the current system wasn’t fair either.
“The system was already favoring the tech-savvy and the person who can just sit at their computer all day cooling off,” Marcus said.
D’Elia said the county is also making appointments by phone to help those who may have issues online.
HOW DO THEY WORK?
Marcus used the Python coding language to create a program that sifts through an immunization clinic’s website, looking for certain keywords and charts indicating new appointments. Other bots use different techniques, depending on how the target website is built.
This type of information gathering, called web scraping, remains a source of resentment. Essentially, scratching is about collecting information from a website that its owner does not wish to collect, said Orin Kerr, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Some web services have taken the web scrapers to court, claiming that the scratching techniques violate the terms and conditions of accessing their sites. A case involving bots that scratched LinkedIn profiles is before the United States Supreme Court.
“There is a disagreement in the courts over the legality of web-scraping,” Kerr said. “It’s a cloudy area. It’s probably legal, but it’s not something we are sure of.
WHAT ABOUT SCALPER BOTS?
The website for a mass vaccination site in Atlantic City, New Jersey, says its online queue system – which makes people wait at the site when slots are allocated – is designed to prevent it from crashing and prevent robots from making “real people” dates. But is this really happening?
Creating a robot capable of making appointments – and not just detecting them – would be much more difficult. And sites typically ask for information like a person’s date of birth to make sure they’re eligible.
Pharmacy giants Walgreens and CVS, which are increasingly giving consumer initiatives across the United States, have previously said they are working to prevent such activity.
Walgreens said it was using cybersecurity techniques to detect and prevent bots so that “only authorized and eligible patients have access to an appointment for a vaccine.” CVS Health said it encountered various types of automated activities and designed its appointment booking system to validate legitimate users.
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