In this increasing age of digitalization, data has become more important than ever. Armed with the right data, you can make the best decisions for your business. One of the most effective ways for businesses to start collecting more data is through web scraping. However, when it comes to collecting data, there are a few debates about how ethical it is to collect and use public data.
If you’ve looked at web scraping, you probably come across unknown terms such as parsing errors, scraping tools, and proxies. You may even have wondered; what are parse errors in Python? You’re in luck. This article will explore web scraping and how businesses can ethically scrape public data. We’ll also discuss how the collected data can be used and some pitfalls that companies should be aware of.
Web Scraping – What Is It?
Web scraping can be described as the process of collecting data and information from different websites and compiling it into a single format so that it can be compared and analyzed. In the past, when you needed information such as the prices your competitors charge for similar products, you had to scour their websites and copy and paste the relevant information into a spreadsheet. This takes a lot of time, effort, and resources that could be spent elsewhere in your business. Now, there are web scraping tools available that automate the process of collecting data.
These tools have been specifically designed for this task and can collect data much faster and more accurately than a person can. As such, you can have the data you need within a few minutes of sending the request when using a data scraping tool.
What Is Data Parsing and How Does it Affect Web Scraping?
When it comes to web scraping, you’ve probably come across the term data parsing? That is because data parsing is an essential part of web scraping. Data parsing is the process of converting data from one format into another. In web scraping, the data parser takes the collected HTML code snippets and converts them into readable text. The information collected through your web scraping efforts is unreadable and useless without data parsing.
Most web scrapers have built-in data parsers. If you build your own web scraper, you’ll need to ensure you also build a data parser to convert the information. This is where some challenges may come up. When building your own scraper, you may end up with parsing errors. This is because parsing errors occur when there is a mistake in the syntax or code of the web scraper or parsing tool or if either of these are outdated. Both of these occur more often in self-built scrapers than already-built scrapers that offer support and frequent updates.
Is Web Scraping Legal?
Until the last few years, the legal use of web scraping was a grey area, and many people were unsure how ethical the process was. The good news is that collecting public data is completely legal. As long as you don’t scrape personal data or try to scrape data behind login protocols or other security measures, you are in the clear.
A great way to think about this is that you can legally collect the data if you can open a website and see the data yourself. However, if you need to log in or complete other security measures, the information is protected from scraping, among other reasons, and you shouldn’t attempt it.
How to Ethically Use Web Scraping?
There is a difference between ethical and legal scraping of data. While it is legal to scrape public data, there are a few things you need to do to ensure that you are scraping ethically.
One of the biggest ethical dilemmas faced due to web scraping is the strain that it places on the bandwidth of the website being scraped. These automatic web scrapers are able to launch thousands of scraping requests at the same time. However, some websites aren’t equipped to handle this many requests simultaneously, which means the website will slow down or even crash. This is why it’s essential to use a scraper proxy, which is a type of rotating residential proxy, and stagger the amount of scraping requests you send so as not to overwhelm the servers of the website being scraped.
You should also not scrape data and then pass it off as your own. We often see this when different websites have articles that are 100% the same. In some cases, the website copying the content has permission from the original creator to post it, but this will usually be accompanied by an attribution giving credit to the original poster. If you find data that you want to repost as is, make sure to ask for permission and give appropriate credit, otherwise re-write/re-create the content in an original way.
Final Thoughts
Web scraping public data is legal, but you also have to make sure to collect and use the data ethically. Scraping data ethically comes down to respect. You have to respect the other websites and ensure your scraping efforts aren’t impacting them negatively. Also, you have to respect the information you’ve collected and ensure that you use it appropriately. If it is for analysis, you should be fine, but when it comes to using content (such as product descriptions, posts, or similar), make sure you have the permission and give the appropriate credit.
