Getting protected user followers

[bobrik]

Hi folks, I own @unfollowr bot and it needs to get its followers
followers by social graph methods, but some users have protected
updates and twitter gives me 401 error. I don't understand why do I
can view user followers on the web and can't do that via api call?
User followers are public anyway.

So maybe there's way to request user for getting his followers and
statuses _without_ following him? Afair, currently requst
automatically adds user to my followers. I don't need such behavior.

Thanks for any feedback and sorry for my English.