The Dark Side of Web Scraping Web scraping, also referred to as data scraping, screen scraping, data harvesting and so forth, is a method of extracting data/information from websites into a spreadsheet or local file saved on your computer. It is considered as one of most suitable approach to acquire data from the World Wide Web, and in some cases to channel that data to another website. Businesses hire web scraping services for different purposes, such as, for web content research, business intelligence research, price comparison, finding sales leads, conducting market research by crawling public data sources, sending product data from an e-commerce site to another online vendor and so forth. “There are numerous positive uses of web scraping; however it gets misused by a small minority as well”, says professionals of web scraping services. The most common misuse of web scraping is email harvesting. Email harvesting is all about the scraping of information from sites, social media and directories to reveal individuals' email addresses, which are then sold on to spammers or scammers. In a few jurisdictions, utilizing techniques like web scraping to gather email addresses with commercial intent is not legal, and it is almost universally considered bad marketing practice. Many internet users have embraced methods to avoid the danger of email harvesters getting hold of their email address, including:
Address munging: altering the format of your email address when posting it openly, e.g. using 'james[at]gmail.com' rather than 'james@gmail.com'. This is a simple yet marginally unreliable way to protect your email address on social media. “A few harvesters are surely going to look for different munged combinations and also emails in a normal format, so it's not, by any means, fully reliable”, says professionals of web scraping services. Contact forms: utilizing contact forms as opposed to posting your email addresses on your website. Pictures: if your email address is presented in image form on your website, it will be past the technological reach of a large amount of people associated with email harvesting.
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