Is Data Scraping Legal?

WEBGlossary

Data Scraping

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You need to copy the prices of 10,000 competitor's products. You can hire 10 students who will copy-paste data manually for a week. Or you can write a script (Scraper) that will do it in 15 minutes. This is Data Scraping.

What does a business use Scraping for?

1. Price tracking (Price tracking): E-commerce stores search competitors' websites to automatically make their prices 1 hryvnia cheaper. 2. Lead Generation (B2B): Collecting contacts, emails and phone numbers of companies from directories (eg Google Maps or LinkedIn) for cold mailings. 3. Learning AI (LLM): The entire ChatGPT was created by OpenAI bots spawning almost the entire internet. 4. Programmatic SEO: Statistical data collection for automatic generation of thousands of articles.

How are sites protected?

Sites don't like being hacked (it loads their servers and steals their data). They use CAPTCHA, blocking by IP (if there are 1000 requests per second from one address) and Cloudflare. Therefore, modern scrapers use proxy servers (Proxy) to imitate the behavior of real people from different countries.

Parsing tools

01No-Code solution

Apify, Browse AI, Octoparse. Allows you to collect data visually, simply by clicking on the necessary elements of the site.

02Code (Python)

BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, or Puppeteer/Selenium libraries for complex sites that require JavaScript or button clicks.

/ FAQ

In general - yes, if you collect publicly available data (like prices). But parsing private data (closed profiles, passwords, sensitive personal information) or collecting data to create direct copy sites violates the law.

Data Scraping

/ Data Scraping

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