What is Web Data Harvesting and Is It Legal?

With the rise of data science and the demand for big data, everyone is seeking new methods to acquire data that will offer them a competitive edge and help them make better decisions. And online data is one of the most underutilized sources of data that has the potential to alter your company.

The online data extraction market has expanded significantly in the last decade as more organizations extract web data in greater and larger volumes. As a result of this rapid expansion, words like web scraping, web data harvesting, web mining, web crawling, data extraction, data mining, and so on have become commonplace. All of these names are used interchangeably, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding in the business.

Is it Legal to Scrape Data?

The legality of web data harvesting is contingent on your compliance with the law and your respect for the websites from which you are gathering public data. The following are a few checks to guarantee compliance:

Personal Information: Make sure you have a legal basis for collecting any data that might be used to directly or indirectly identify a specific person, and that you follow all applicable privacy regulations.

Copyrighted Information - Before collecting data from a website, check to see if the online data you're gathering is copyrighted. You must guarantee that any data collection or usage complies with all relevant copyright laws.

Login Data - You agree with the website owner when you log in and accept conditions. You should read the agreements carefully to see if data harvesting is permitted. You should always follow through on the terms of every agreement you make.

Web Scraping vs. Web Data Harvesting

Simply speaking, data harvesting and web scraping are two distinct ways of referring to the same thing. Web data harvesting, is a useful tool to have in your toolbox. From pricing intelligence to market research, it has applications in practically every business.

With the growth of the business, there are now a variety of data extraction tools and services available to assist you in collecting data from websites.

Contact iWeb Scraping if you need any assistance regarding web scraping services.