Between April and July 2021, LinkedIn user data was scraped for more than one billion accounts and sold across the dark web. Only a month before that, scrappers hoovered up information about more than 500 million Facebook users. To my mind, these are early symptoms of a disease that is spreading across the web-based business world: data security. Social media tools like GramSnap provide anonymous Instagram viewing, and automated bots are more prevalent than ever. It is crucial to know the mechanics of how web scraping works so that you can know what steps to take toward safeguarding your digital property.
This article will go over what web scraping is, why you should care, and what you can do to protect your data.
Table of Contents
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of automatically collecting information from various websites. This is done with bots, also known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” that are designed to search through web pages and collect data.
There are two types of scraping:
- Manual Scrape: Not much different from copying and pasting data off the web yourself. Slow: Hard for automation to find, because it looks like real human activity.
- Automated Scrape: This involves deploying bots to scrape massive data at high speed. These bots may be anything from simple scripts to complex programs that simulate human actions, such as a Blooket Bot used to automate things in web games.
How Scraping Can Damage Your Business
Some scraping is to be expected, such as search engines indexing pages of content, but harmful scraping can lead to severe consequences. The results can be as mild as losing a competitive advantage or massive financial penalties.
- Competitive Edge Decimation: Competitors may scrape your prices, product descriptions, and user reviews to get a leg up on you.
- Disrupted SEO Rankings: Not only that, when your content duplicates in many places on the web, search engines might enforce a penalty on your website, leading you to fall in your rankings.
- Stolen Proprietary Data: What may already be copyrighted content, user data, or other proprietary information can be taken and sold or exploited for harmful purposes.
- Slowed Website Performance: The sheer volume of bot traffic can overwhelm your servers, causing your site to load slowly, or in some cases not at all, for actual users.
The financial impact of scraping is staggering. Take a look at these numbers:
| Statistic | Impact | Source |
| Average data breach cost | $4.45 million | IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report |
| Impact on e-commerce profitability | Up to 80% | Aberdeen Research |
| Impact on media sector revenue | 3.0%-14.8% | Aberdeen Research |
| Potential GDPR fines | Up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue | GDPR |
Is Web Scraping Legal?
The law regarding web scraping is unclear. In April 2022, a U.S. court determined that scraping public data is not an offense against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). That means pulling data that isn’t behind a paywall or login is generally considered legal.
But if personal data is part of the mix, things get tricky. Laws such as the GDPR in Europe levy enormous fines for gathering personal data without permission. Scraping can also be against a website’s terms of service, and may result in legal action. For example, tools that allow the viewing of Instagram content anonymously, in this case, the GramSnap Instagram Viewer feature, are done by scraping public data and violate Instagram’s policies. You might still be anonymous to the content creator, but the service may track your IP and browsing data, and while it is being used, your account may be blocked.
How to Protect Your Website from Scrapers
Safeguarding your data takes a little more than some rudimentary security efforts. Here’s a look at how top scraping defense providers are addressing the problem:
- HUMAN Security applies behavioral analysis and machine learning to separate human visitors from high-level bots, preventing harmful scraping in real-time.
- GeeTest specialises in identifying abnormal traffic patterns and repetitive behaviors in an effort to detect scrapers early so as to mitigate their impact.
- PromptCloud advocates ethical scraping with a strong focus on adhering to specific regulations such as GDPR and utilizing end-to-end encryption for data security.
Businesses need to adopt a strong defense, they said. Obvious ones like IP blocking are insufficient because higher-end bots can cycle through such measures like candy. Using a dedicated scraping defense system is the best solution for safeguarding your content and user information.
Protect Your Digital Assets
Web scraping is a nuisance, but it’s much more than that, it’s a menace to your business and the security, reputation, and profitability of your business. With increased sophistication of scrapers, the threat of data breach and monetary loss increases. Scraping awareness and defensive strategies will help you continue gaining value from your data, ahead of those that are trying to take it.
