Is web scraping legal? Well, there has been an ongoing debate on this, and we will make an attempt to draw some clarity on this topic in this article.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
First Things First – What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a process in which a program, algorithm, script, or bot is used to extract data from the web. Whether you are a data scientist, engineer or an organization that needs to analyze heaps of data every now and then, web scraping could prove to be an ultimate solution. There are plenty of web scraping tools out there that will aid you with such task, and Oxylabs web scraping tool is a good place to start if you’re interested.
Let’s explore how web scraping empowers businesses.
Why Organizations and Enterprises Use Web Scraping?
- Easy access to data
The World Wide Web has heaps of data on a certain topic. From company profiles to prices of different commodities – anything and everything can be easily extracted from web pages through web scraping. Organizations can then feed the extracted data into their database and use it for prediction, analytics, and other business intelligence purposes.
- Lead generation
We’re sure, you saw it coming. Web scraping can provide you with all the required data, thus helping you build an automated sales machine effectively.
Web scraping enables businesses to skim through LinkedIn, Google Maps, AngelList, and other data aggregating platforms to gather all the information about prospective customers. This proves to be time-saving for the organizations as their sales team do not need to extract all these details manually. What’s more, the data pulled off by a web scraper is 100% accurate and reliable.
- Marketing automation
Repeat with us: there are endless opportunities for you to explore with web scraping. ENDLESS.
Let’s assume that your company sells health supplements. While scrolling through your Insta feed, you spotted one of your competitors with a massive community of 20k+ followers. But guess what, your product is far better than your competitor.
What do you do? You simply scrape their Instagram page and extract their followers’ details. Next, you DM them and target them with your amazing offers and discounts.
Since these followers are already interested in a product similar to yours, these are high-quality leads, and targeting them through ads and other campaigns will produce better results.
- Brand monitoring
Web scraping can help you with brand monitoring. With tons of platforms where your users can go and rate your services and website, it is a tough task to keep a close eye on all of them. But this task can be made easier with web scraping wherein you just need to scrape the required platforms and take the required action.
You can further take your marketing efforts a notch further by monitoring social networking and conducting a quick sentiment analysis and respond quickly to haters and reward users who love you.
With All These Uses, Why is Web Scraping Considered Illegal?
Depending on what your end-purpose is, web scraping can be loved or hated
On the one hand, scraping bots help market researchers in analyzing and predicting market trends, comparing prices, indexing web content and the like, on the other hand, web scraping is also used for bad intentions. It is used to conduct a variety of harmful activities like data mining, data theft, DDoS attacks, spams, online fraud and the like.
Thus, it is safe to say that web scraping and crawling are not illegal activities in themselves if done ethically. However, the real problem starts when you scrape or crawl someone’s website without obtaining prior permission or when you disregard their Terms of Service.
How to Ensure That You Are Scraping Legally?
Here are a few ways through which you can stay cautious and scrape ethically:
- Avoid scraping data if an API is provided
- Check the Terms of Service and adhere to them strictly
- Avoid republishing the scraped or crawled data to your website or any other asset without obtaining permission from the copyright holder
- Monitor your crawl rate. Do not bombard the target website with too many requests. We will highly recommend you to send 1 request at an interval of 12-15 seconds.
- If you are getting interrupted by robots.txt, it is always the best practice to ask for written permission from them before doing anything else.
- Provide a proper identity to your web scraper with a legitimate user agent string which could look something like this: https://mywebsite.com/scrapingbot.html
- Last but not least, if you are doubtful and are not sure of the legality of what you are doing, it is always better to avoid doing it or take proper permissions from your lawyer.
The Wrap Up
Web scraping is legal as long as you do it right. However, it might also land you in trouble if you hurt the target webmasters and platforms in any way.
Just think about it; you are using their bandwidth and retrieving their data by putting an extra load on their website. They have their reasons why they might want to technically block you, warn you, or even sue you. Technically, this is what happened with LinkedIn and the company has now sued 1-100 people who scraped the portal anonymously.
Thus, avoid getting into trouble, and follow the tips mentioned above to keep it safe and legal!
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