Ethical and legal ways to web scraping

 

The popularity of web scraping is growing at such an accelerating rate these days that it would be almost impossible not to get cross-answered when the big question arises: is it legal?

If you’ve been browsing the internet for a legitimate answer that best suits your needs, you’ve come to the right place. This article aims to outline the legal issues you should be aware of when scraping, and also offers information on how to minimize the risks.

The question of whether web scraping is legal or not has a definitive and unique answer. This answer depends on many factors and some may vary depending on the laws and regulations of the country. But first, let’s briefly define what web scraping is for those unfamiliar with the concept before we dive into the legality.

Web Scraping

Web Scraping is the automated art of collecting and organizing public information available on the Internet. The result is typically a structured composition stored in a table of contents as an Excel spreadsheet, which displays the extracted data in a “readable” format.

This practice requires a software agent that automatically downloads the desired information by mimicking browser interaction. This “robot” can access several pages at the same time, saving you precious time copying and pasting data.

The web scraper does this by sending many more requests per second than another human could. That said, your scratch engine should remain anonymous to avoid being detected and blocked.

If you want to read more information on how to avoid getting banned from the data part, I recommend that you read this article before choosing a web scraping provider. I use a news API and those are also a sort of web scrapers but more complex and specific as it only scraps the news websites to collect news data and news article’s metadata and converts it into structured JSON, CSV, and Excel format for the user.

So now that we have an overview of what a web scraping tool can do, let’s find out how to use it and sleep soundly at night.

Is web scraping illegal?

Using a web scraper to collect data from the internet is not in itself a criminal act. Many times it is perfectly legal to scratch a website, but the way you intend to use that data may be illegal. The legitimacy of the process is determined by several factors, depending on a particular situation.

The kind of data are you scraping

What do you want to do with the scraped data

How you managed to collect the data from the website

Data types

Data such as rainfall or temperature readings, demographic statistics, prices, and ratings may seem perfectly legal to scratch because they are not protected by copyright. And that’s not personal data either. But if the source of the information belongs to a website whose terms and conditions prohibit scratching, you may find yourself in trouble.

So let’s dive into each of the two types of sensitive data to better understand how to intelligently scrape:

1. Personal Data
2. Copyrighted Data

Personal data

Any type of data that can be used to identify a specific individual is considered personal data (PII in more technical terms).

One of the hottest talking points in today’s business world is the General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR is the legislative mechanism that establishes the rules for collecting and processing the personal data of citizens of the European Union (EU).

As a general rule, it is recommended that you have a legitimate reason for obtaining, storing, and using your personal data without your consent.

The vast majority of the time, businesses use web scraping techniques to collect data for lead generation, sales information, and similar issues. This goal is generally not compatible with any of those legitimate reasons, such as official authority, where personal data can be accessed without any consent if it is a matter of public interest.

Keep in mind: you are more likely to escape legally safely if you stay away from mining personal data (if we are talking about EU citizens or Californians).

Copyrighted data

Data is king. And every king has guards on duty to protect him. And one of the most ruthless soldiers in this scenario is Copyright. This prohibits you from scratching, storing, and/or reproducing data without the author’s blessing.

As with copyrighted photographs and music, the fact that data is publicly available on the Internet does not automatically imply that it is legal to delete it without the owner’s permission.

Businesses and individuals who own copyrighted data have a specific power over its reuse and capture. Scraping copyrighted data is not illegal as long as you do not intend to reuse or publish it.

Do you remember this box that you must check each time you create an account? Because the box remembers you. And if you somehow manage to scratch a website that clearly prohibits the use of automated engines to access their content, you could be in trouble.

The terms of use reflect the intro: legal agreements between a service provider (a website) and the person using that service (to access their information). Therefore, the user must accept the terms and conditions if he wishes to use the website.

Data scraping is something that must be done responsibly. So it is best to review the terms and conditions before deleting a website.

Make sure that it remains legal and ethical

1. Check Robot.txt file

In the old days, when the internet barely learned its first words, developers had already discovered a way to scrape, crawl, and index newborn pages. These children who are qualified for such operations are nicknamed “robots” or “spiders”, and they have occasionally stumbled upon websites that weren’t meant to be scratched or indexed.

All Web, the inventor of the world’s first search engine, came up with a solution: a set of rules that every robot must obey. To help ground the definition, a Robots.txt is a text file in the root directory of a website designed to tell web robots how to crawl pages.

So, in order to scrape smoothly, you need to carefully follow and check the Robots.txt rules. There is a little trick that can help you take a look behind the scenes of a website: type robots.txt at the end of any URL (https: //www.example.com/robots .txt)

However, if the Terms service or Robots.txt clearly hinders content scraping, you must first get written permission from the website owner before you start collecting their data.

2. Protect your web scraping identity

If you are browsing the web for marketing purposes, anonymization is the first security measure you can take. A pattern of repeated and consistent requests sent from the same IP address can trigger many red flags. Websites can distinguish crawlers from real users by monitoring browser activity, checking the IP address, setting honeypots, attaching CAPTCHAs, or even limiting the request rate.

There are several ways to protect your identity, to name a few:

• A strong proxy pool
• Use rotating proxies
• Use residential IPs
• Take Anti-fingerprinting measures

3. Only collect what you need

Businesses often tend to abuse the power of a web scraper by collecting as much data as possible. This is because they think it might be useful in the future, but in most cases, the data also has an expiration date.

4. Check for copyright violations

Since data on some websites may be copyrighted, it would be a good idea to apply for a property warrant before you start scratching.

Please ensure that you do not reuse or republish scraped data content without verifying the website license or receiving written permission from the copyright holder of the data.

5. Scrape public data only

If you want to sleep peacefully, we recommend that you only use public data collection. If the content you want is private, you need to make sure you get the proper approval from the site’s source.

Conclusion

There you have it, we have covered all the main points that determine whether your web scrape is legit or not. What companies want to scratch in the vast majority of cases is quite honest if the rules and ethics allow it.

However, I recommend that you always verify by asking yourself these three questions:

• Is the data is Copyrighted or not?
• Am I scraping personal data?
• Am I violating the Terms and Conditions?

If you receive NO for all of these questions, congratulations: you are free to legally scrape the web.

Just try to find the right balance between collecting all the data you want and following the rules and regulations of the site.

Also, remember that the main purpose of the data collected is to be analyzed and not republished.