Ethics of Web Scraping

Web scraping refers to the method of extracting web data for varied purposes. Also often termed as spidering or crawling, it leverages sophisticated tools and techniques to gather data from a particular website. Big companies use web scraping to strengthen their database and earn sumptuously by using or selling the contained data. Even Google draws billions of dollars by seeking the permission from websites to index their internal pages, which is called as third party scraping. However, engines doing the task of scraping not only index the data but also convert it into a format that makes it easy to transfer to a spread sheet or database.

Web scraping is a common process that companies use for the benefit of their organizations or in the interest of the clients. However, such ubiquitous use doesn’t deter to raise the question – Is web scraping legal? Well, the answer is a sort of mixed bags. While it is legal to use web scraping techniques for the benefit of the humankind, certain unscrupulous acts also keep affecting the ethics of web scraping now and then. Let’s have a glimpse of both these aspects.

Benefits to support legal face of web scraping

Several fields utilize web data extractor tools for the benefit of society and hence contribute in endorsing the legal aspect of web scraping. For instance, several mobile apps extract information from important sources online, to inform you about your spending habits. This makes you more attentive and aware on making unnecessary purchases hence keeping a check on your financial obligations. News Channels and weather forecasting departments often deploy web data extractor to estimate the trend of future climatic conditions and make the people aware about the same.

Healthcare is another vital field where web scraping companies find religious use. The organizations in this domain leverage web scraping service to get information on the use of their healthcare services. It also furnishes vital details on the customer’s perception of the organization and the volume of implementation of different facilities it offers. Web scraping technique is also helpful in preparing a directory of healthcare providers working with a particular medical care center. The patients find it easier to search for the medical practitioner that could treat their health problem. All this contributes in building a healthy relationship between the healthcare organization and the patients.

Activities that hamper the ethics of web scraping

Unfortunately, legal and ethical issues in healthcare keep on prevailing due to the presence of certain fraudulent people in the industry. For instance, the hackers may intrude into a hospital’s confidential data and steal vital information about the patients, doctors, and equipment. The security of the involved people and objects may get compromised under any such circumstance.

Moving over, web scraping could give rise to severe legal and ethical issues since it involves the reading of websites at a speed, which is way faster than humans. Rapid request from a data scraping company can tend the server to face handling problems, which could ultimately lead to slow processing of the website. This attack is called as “Denial of Service”, which the hackers often use for wrong intentions.

The cases of scraping the content from one website and posting it on another website are also common. If the victim website protects its content under copyright, intellectual property and trademark laws, the defaulters are likely to face strict action under any such occurrence.

Web scraping techniques

A web scraping company leverages numerous tools and techniques to extract data from a website. It is however always good if it performs the web scraping activity through legal ways and avoids unethical approach. Some of the widely web scraping techniques and tools include:

• Use of codes and specific functions for web data extraction and format conversion
• The use of metadata and annotations
• Human copy-paste
• HTML Programming and parsing
• Platforms for vertical aggregation
• Software like Import.io, Uipath, Screen Scraper, Kimono, etc.

Summary: Certain legal and ethical issues surround the web scraping techniques. It is however always better to perform web scraping through legal ways. Certain tools and techniques to perform this task include human copy-paste, html programming, and tools like Import.io, Uipath, and more.