It&#x27;s still a different scenario. Cops, up until a few years ago, used to think they could stick GPS devices on people&#x27;s cars without a warrant because they were legally allowed to tail and observe people driving in vehicles without a warrant. The GPS device, like a lot of technology, allowed them to &quot;observe and tail&quot; hundreds of vehicles all at once.<p>The SCOTUS stepped in and said that the practice was illegal without a warrant because, despite a vehicle moving around a city in plain and public view, being allowed to monitor hundreds or even thousands of vehicles from a central location with only a handful of officers was outside of the scope that allowed them to hop into a vehicle and follow someone else, which would require hundreds of officers and hundreds of vehicles observing with their own eyes.<p>It&#x27;s the same idea. Getting access to data that is not public (in reference to the credit card transaction data, not satellite imagery), in order to profit from a publicly traded stock, does not create a level playing field. Semi-realtime satellite imagery, on the other hand, may not be completely public, but it&#x27;s publicly available data (with a fee, possibly, from the operators of the satellites, which is a device or technology that wasn&#x27;t built to specifically observe walmart parking lot capacity). I would argue that it&#x27;s still a grey area, as you can only interpolate sales based on a tangental dataset like parking lot capacity. But getting access to actual transaction history from the stores is a direct correlation to their sales and revenue model, which drives their eventual stock price.<p>I don&#x27;t see how anyone could argue that they were &quot;just doing their homework&quot;. They were subverting a system for financial gain. They weren&#x27;t taking data that anyone could obtain and doing a novel approach to interpret tangental sales figures.