Web scraping is not a new concept as the whole Internet is based on it. For instance, when you share a Youtube video’s link on Facebook, its data gets scraped so that people can see the video’s thumbnail in your post. Thus there are endless ways to use data scraping for everybody’s benefit. But there are some ethical aspects involved in scraping data from the web.
Suppose you apply for a health insurance plan, and you gladly give your personal information to the provider in exchange for the service they provide. But what if some stranger does web scraping magic with your data and uses it for personal purposes. Things can start getting inappropriate, right? Here comes the need for practicing ethical web scraping.
In this article, we will discuss the web scraping code of conduct and the legal and ethical considerations.
For practicing legal web scraping, you need to adhere to the following simple rules.
You need to keep in mind the below ethics while scraping data from the web.
You need to know that web scraping can be illegal in certain circumstances. If the terms and conditions of the website that we want to scrape prohibit users from copying and downloading the content, then we should not scrape that data and respect the terms of that website.
It is OK to scrape the data that is not behind the password-protected authentication system ( publicly available data), keeping in mind that you don’t break the website. However, it can be a potential problem if you share the scraped data further. For instance, if you download content from one website and post it on another website, your scraping will be considered illegal and constitute a copyright violation.
Whenever you write a web scraper, you query a website repeatedly and potentially access its large number of pages. For each page, a request is sent to the web server that hosts the site. The server processes the request and sends a response back to the computer that runs the code. The requests that we send consume the server’s resources. So, if we send too many requests over a short span of time, we can prevent the other regular users from accessing the site during that time.
Most modern web servers include measures for warding off the illegitimate use of their resources, as DoS attacks are common on the Internet. They are vigilant for large numbers of requests coming from a single IP address. They can block that address if it sends multiple requests over a short time interval.
It is worthwhile to ask the curators or the owners of the data you plan to scrape, depending on the scope of your project. You can ask them if they have data available in a structured format that can fit your project needs. If you want to use their data for research purposes in a manner that could potentially interest them, you can save yourself from the trouble of writing a web scraper.
You can also save others from the trouble of writing a web scraper. For instance, if you publish your data or documentation as part of the research project, someone might want to get your data for use. If you want, you can provide others with a way to download your raw data in a structured format, thus saving t
Data privacy and copyright legislation differ from country to country. You need to check the laws that apply in your context. For example, in countries like Australia, it is illegal to scrape personal information like phone numbers, email addresses, and names even if they are publicly available.
You should adhere to the web scraping code of conduct to scrape data for your personal use. However, if you want to harvest large amounts of data for commercial or research purposes, you probably have to seek legal advice.
You know that proxies have a wide variety of applications. Their primary purpose is to hide the IP address and the user’s location. Proxies also allow users to access geo-restricted content when surfing the Internet. Thus, the users can access the hidden pages as proxies bypass the content and geo-restrictions.
You can use proxies to maximize the scraper’s output as they reduce the block rates. Without them, you can scrape minimal data from the web. It is because proxies surpass crawl rates allowing spiders to extract more data. The crawl rate indicates the number of requests you can send in a given timeframe. This rate varies from site to site.
You can choose proxies depending on your project requirements. You can either use a private proxy or a shared proxy.
You can identify the IP sources apart from choosing proxies for your project. There are three categories of proxy servers.
