Читать книгу Digital Marketing - Annmarie Hanlon - Страница 37

Web scraping or harvesting means taking data from websites without the owner's permission. It works by using web scraping software to visit websites, identify email addresses and add to a local database. The database is typically sold on as ‘new data’ and those making the purchase might think these companies have permission to sell the data!

Whilst web scraping is not technically illegal, using the data may be and often results in getting emails blocked and reported as spam.

The challenge with big data for consumers occurs when a company scrapes their data or uses their in-house data for other purposes, such as selling to third-party ‘partner organisations’ who advertise potentially unwanted products or adopt shady selling techniques.