PokerStars Reversing Course on Datamining?

After a decision two weeks or so ago to severely limit the ability of sites such as Sharkscope and Official Poker Rankings to collect SNG tournament results from their lobby, online poker giant Poker Stars appears to have reversed course, at least temporarily.

Starting a few weeks ago, PokerStars began limiting access to tournament results of certain forms of MTT SNGs to players who had participated in those tournaments. A Stars rep posted the following explanation on 2+2:

At PokerStars we believe that the only people who have the right to see your Sit & Go tournament history (including ROI, total profit, and so on) are you, and people you explicitly choose to share that information with.

This is just one of several measures designed to undermine SNG results database websites, which knowingly violate our Terms of Service and our players’ privacy. The restricted lobbies are planned to be gradually rolled out to the majority of SNG tournaments.

Fast forward two weeks, and not only has the restricted lobby policy not been rolled out to the majority of SNG tournaments - it appears to have been completely rolled back. While details of the rollback aren’t entirely clear, tracking site OfficialPokerRankings.com stated on their website today that: “PokerStars has (for now) reversed their decision and we are able to track the missing (27,180-360) SNG tourneys again.”

It appears that Sharkscope has made a slight alteration to their policy and now does not display ROI and games played for accounts that have requested their stats to be blocked. No word on whether or not this policy change factored into the decision by Stars to restore lobby access.

UPDATE: On 4/17, PokerStars Support responded with the following (semi) clarification:

To clarify, the policy has not been reversed or suspended, although we have changed the games which are currently restricted.

PokerStars still takes player privacy very seriously, and we still plan to
restrict rogue datamining websites from gathering Sit & Go tournament
results in the future. We will, however, continue to work with any results website which wishes to co-operate with us.