As businesses keep growing online, new data-gathering strategies are required. One of the most popular tactics that's been around for years is data mining, also known as web scraping. However, before you use a cURL proxy like this to collect information, you must examine the ethical concerns of this practice and consider ways to mine data in the right way.

Ethical Concerns of Web Scraping

As you can expect, severe privacy and other ethical concerns exist with any mass information-gathering strategy. Data mining is when you use a web scraper to collect data from various websites, often sending many requests to that website. You should only collect the necessary information, but that's not always the case as data mining is not always handled right. Make sure you keep your business away from bad data collection practices.

Why Can Web Scraping Be Bad?

Some see data mining as exploiting customers for the company's profit and that these companies gather private information without regard for the customer's authorization. Others are concerned that businesses that gather this information don't adequately protect it, resulting in an accessible data market for hackers and cybercriminals to use.

One of the most significant ethical concerns is that companies aren't transparent in how they use the information, meaning they can sell your information, use it for unethical purposes or other things. Further, there's a controversy surrounding what personal data entails. If you gave your information to a company, is it still personal information, or is it now public domain?

The Importance of Transparency

There's raging competition between companies today to grow their clientele and business. As such, earning and keeping your client's trust is essential to running a successful business. However, a company that hides things and doesn't directly engage with its clientele will never be trustworthy.

A culture of caution is growing in the industry, with clients more likely to read privacy and data collection policies. Entirely transparent companies are more likely to be seen as reliable.

How to Become an Ethical Web Scraper?

There are various aspects your company must complete for web scraping to be considered ethical. Below, we examine the most critical points you should make part of your data collection policy.

Only Scrape When Necessary

Sometimes, it's unnecessary to scrape information from a website. Some websites provide public APIs you can use to gather the information, and in those cases, you should use it instead of a data miner or a cURL proxy.

User Agent String Identification

The second part of being ethical is ensuring you can always be identified if you've web scraped a website. If you want to hide your identity, then chances are there's something unethical about the information you're gathering.

Pass any information you scrape through a user agent string, or provide your own user agent string to help the website owner identify you. With this identification, they should also be able to contact you if necessary.

Mine Data at a Reasonable Rate

Businesses often look for a large amount of data as soon as possible. However, a side effect of this can be that you send too many requests and overwhelm a website. In this case, the site can mistakenly identify your web scraping as a DDoS attack, which can cause the website owner losses in customers, time, and money.

Always ensure to mine the information at a reasonable pace and throttle the number of requests per second to control how many you send. This throttle restriction will help avoid the site categorizing your request for data as a DDoS attack. You should also try to schedule your scraping requests to times when the website isn't busy whenever possible. This will limit a possible negative experience for actual users.

Only Scrape Public Information

This aspect is an ethical concern and can also become a legal one if you're not careful. Only ever scrape public data. Public data is information publicly available to anyone who looks for it. You can collect it without legal consequences, however, you cannot pass it off as your own.

Often, information like this is available to anyone searching for it online, so it's no problem if you collect it through web scraping. The trouble comes in if you collect data that might be sensitive and that you don't have explicit permission to use. You can use a site's robot.txt and analytics to find publicly available information and which sectors you should avoid.

Use the Information Ethically

Part of ethically gathering data is only storing the information you explicitly need. As such, if you gather a wide range of information but only want to know the sneaker prices of your competitor, remove any information that doesn't apply to that topic.

Further, once you have the information, be transparent about what you use it for and how you use it. This can help remove concerns about abusing the information you've gathered. Don't exploit the data and people it affects to create profit, but use it in a manner you won't mind explaining if asked about it.

Become Part of the Ethical Side of Web Scraping

Data mining is critical to any business operation, as manually gathering that amount of information isn't realistic. However, you should ensure your company practices ethical data mining. Luckily, provided you follow the above aspects when gathering information, you can become an ethical data miner with nothing to be ashamed of in the business and legal domain.