- Jun 24, 2016
- 636
The Dangers of Web Scraping:
SOURCE: information-age.com (ARTICLE DATE: 5 Sep 2016)
Web scraping’s prevalence, sophistication, and industry has expanded alongside the internet’s growth.
Distil Networks, a bot detection and mitigation company, have just released a new study that analyses this rise...
Through analysis of top web scraping platforms and services, the report outlines how the democratisation of web scraping allows users to effortlessly steal sensitive information on the web.
Web scraping is a computer software technique for extracting information from websites, and often includes transforming unstructured website data into a database for analysis or repurposing content into the web scraper’s own website and business operations.
While much of this is not illegal, it sits in a grey area where legality and morality can be debated.
In most cases, bots, which make up 46% of web traffic, are implemented by individuals to perform web scraping at a much faster rate than humans alone.
38% of companies who engage in web scraping do so to obtain content, while it is also used for research, contact scraping, price comparison, weather data monitoring, and website change detection.
The top industries affected by web scraping that the studying identified were (in order): Real estate, digital publishing, e-commerce, directories and classifieds, airlines and travel.
Currently, according to the report, around 2% of online revenues can be lost through misuse of this online content.
This is not the only issue, with web scraping’s ability to expose ‘private’ information that is posted online, and could lead to significant fines in a world of stricter regulations...
SOURCE: information-age.com (ARTICLE DATE: 5 Sep 2016)
Web scraping’s prevalence, sophistication, and industry has expanded alongside the internet’s growth.
Distil Networks, a bot detection and mitigation company, have just released a new study that analyses this rise...
Through analysis of top web scraping platforms and services, the report outlines how the democratisation of web scraping allows users to effortlessly steal sensitive information on the web.
Web scraping is a computer software technique for extracting information from websites, and often includes transforming unstructured website data into a database for analysis or repurposing content into the web scraper’s own website and business operations.
While much of this is not illegal, it sits in a grey area where legality and morality can be debated.
In most cases, bots, which make up 46% of web traffic, are implemented by individuals to perform web scraping at a much faster rate than humans alone.
38% of companies who engage in web scraping do so to obtain content, while it is also used for research, contact scraping, price comparison, weather data monitoring, and website change detection.
The top industries affected by web scraping that the studying identified were (in order): Real estate, digital publishing, e-commerce, directories and classifieds, airlines and travel.
Currently, according to the report, around 2% of online revenues can be lost through misuse of this online content.
This is not the only issue, with web scraping’s ability to expose ‘private’ information that is posted online, and could lead to significant fines in a world of stricter regulations...
[To read the full article please visit information-age.com]
