What will be the ethics of web scraping? Someone recently asked: “Is web scraping an honest concept?” I believe that web scraping is an ethical concept absolutely. Web scraping (or screen scraping) is a mechanism to truly have a computer to read a website. There is no technical difference between a computerized computer viewing a website and a human-driven computer observing a website.
Furthermore, if done properly, scraping can offer many benefits to all or any involved. There are a bunch of great uses for web scraping. First, services like Instapaper, which allow saving content for reading on the run, use display scraping to save a copy of the web site to your phone. That is useful because banks do not provide many ways for programmers to access your financial data, even if you want them to. By getting usage of your data, programmers can offer really interesting visualizations and insight into your spending habits, which can help you save money.
That said, web scraping can veer into unethical territory. This may take the form of reading websites more speedily than a human being could, which can cause difficulty for the servers to take care of it. This can cause degraded performance in the website. Malicious hackers use this technique in what’s known as a “Denial of Service” assault.
Another facet of unethical web scraping will come in what you do with this data. Some individuals will scrape the material of a website and post it as their own, in effect stealing this article. This is a huge no-no for the same reasons that taking someone else’s book and putting your name on it is a bad idea.
Intellectual property, trademark, and the laws of copyright still apply on the internet as well as your legal recourse is much the same. People participating in web scraping should remember to comply with the stated terms of service for a website. Even when in compliance with those terms, you should take special treatment to ensure your activity doesn’t affect other users of a website. One of the disadvantages to screen scraping is it can be a brittle process.
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Minor changes to the support website could leave a scraper completely broken. Herein is situated the mechanism for avoidance: making changes to the structure of the code of your website can wreak havoc on the screen scraper’s capability to remove information. Periodically making changes that are invisible to an individual but affect this content of the code being came back is the very best system to thwart display scrapers.
That said, this is a set-back. Authors of display screen scrapers can always upgrade them and, as there is absolutely no technical difference between a computer-backed browser and a human-backed web browser, there is no way to 100% prevent gain access to. Going forward, I expect the screen scraping to increase. One of the main reasons for screen scraping is that the underlying website doesn’t have a means for developers to get access to the data they want.