What is 'Data Scraping'?

On October 1, 2020, Facebook sued two companies in the United States for 'data scraping' from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube and LinkedIn for unauthorised purposes. This article will guide you about 'data scraping', reasons behind it, its legality and how this data is helpful for the businesses. 

What is data scraping?

Data scraping is a technique used by the attackers to extract valuable data from a website. For this, an application is used by the attackers to scrap data for unauthorised purposes. 

Types of data scraping:

There are majorly three types of data scraping. These are as follows: 

1- Content scraping- In this case, the bot extracts the content from the website and post it on their own website as original content. For example, content is extracted from The New York Times and is published by the startups as their own. 

2- Price scraping- In this case, the bot extracts the pricing data from their competitors' website and can benefit from it to a great extent. For example, pricing data of Amazon can be extracted and used by its competitors. 

3- Contact scraping- In this case, the bot extracts personal information of the people such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers. This data is used by the scammers as well as spammers to find new targets. For example, contact information can be extracted from Facebook and can be used by the spammers and scammers. 

What happens to this data?

Once the data from the targetted website is extracted, it is stored in a spreadsheet in a readable format and is used to sell marketing intelligence to third parties. 

How businesses benefit from data scraping?

The businesses can benefit a lot from data scraping. These are as follows:

1- The data extracted is helpful for businesses in monitoring their competitors (strengths and weaknesses), ensuring that they do not lose their market share. 

2- It also helps to extract the most effective keywords. This, in turn, draws organic traffic to their websites. 

3- Data scraping also helps in collecting data on the targetted market, improving market strategy. This information can be used to develop products that meet the demands of consumers.   

Why websites do not allow data scraping?

Most of the websites do not allow data scraping as it slows down their website, compromising the users' experience. They also do not want their valuable data to be used by their competitors against them. As a result, web scraping bots and content protection strategies try to outmanoeuvre the other. 

Is it legal?

The legality of data scraping is still a matter of debate amongst the business owners. It is legal as far as the data scraped is available in the public domain and is used to gain insights and not for profit out of it. Many companies like Facebook do not allow data scraping on their websites and can sue the companies extracting data. 

Data scraping is mostly done by the startups and small businesses to draw organic traffic to their websites, develop customer-responsive products and to monitor their competitors. A simple search query should reveal the information you need and the information sought must be used to gain insights for developing better strategies, making better decisions and not for unauthorised purposes. 

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