

Even journalists and non-profit organizations are employing this big data research methodology to shape their visions and get ahead in the industry. THE BOTTOM LINE Web scraping has become a norm in today’s data-driven business world. After all, it’s their website you’re scraping. When this happens, respect their decision and do what they want.

Be respectful: When a website detects your web scraping activities, they may contact your proxy provider and ask you to slow down or even stop scraping. Too many requests might overload their server and may cause damage.ģ.

Do not cause any harm: Make sure that your bots do not harm the websites you are scraping. Do not bombard them with too many requests since doing so might raise a red flag. Behave well: This entails limiting your requests to every target site so that they will not feel invaded. To avoid any problems and also to keep your scraping activities ethical, here are some best practices that we have learned from clients we assisted in their proxies for web scraping needs: 1. This is primarily the reason why websites had employed mechanisms to detect bot behaviour and block them. The problem is when you scrape other sites and your activities become a burden to them because of the number of requests you are sending. WEB SCRAPING ETHICAL BEST PRACTICES Web scraping in itself is not illegal, as you can even scrape your website to aid your analytics. The safest route is to use datacenter IP addresses so there are no privacy issues. Otherwise, you will face legal ramifications. Make sure that if you decide to use third party residential proxies, these companies have direct, expressed and clear consent of the IP owners. But when a third party provider is involved, that’s another story. If you own the residential IP addresses you use as proxies, then there’s no problem. GDPR rules require that the owners of these IP addresses give you explicit permission to use their IP. I’m referring to residential IPs and mobile IP addresses, particularly those that belong to the EU countries. With the onset of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), however, your choice of proxy IP address can already get you in trouble regardless of how you are using the proxies. It’s what you do while connected to proxy servers that matter. As everyone knows, there are people who use proxies for dubious reasons and activities, but it doesn’t make the use of proxies in general illegal. Classified ads LEGAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS WHEN WEB SCRAPING WITH PROXIES There are a lot of gray areas when it comes to the legality of web scraping and the use of proxies.Towards Data Science have published an exhaustive list of industries and fields of studies that use web scraping and how it is being applied. As you can see, data research is among the top uses of web scraping, and most industries (if not all) use data to develop business strategies and plans. Less than 1% of companies use web scraping as a way to monitor weather data and changes in competitor websites.16.1% of companies use web scraping tools to track and monitor competitor prices.19.1% scrape the web to get the email address and other contact information of potential and existing customers.25.9% of companies use web scraping to do market research and get the perception of consumers about certain companies and products or services/.38.2% of companies use web scraping to gather ideas and curate content.This chart from taken from Distil Networks shows the top uses of web scraping, by percentage. Web scraping has six primary uses, and these are content scraping, research, contact scraping, price comparison, weather data monitoring, and website change detection. Learning the intricacies involved in choosing proxies for web scraping may have clouded your mind against web scraping in general, so let’s also touch up a bit on how web scraping is being used in the real world.
