One of the most attractive aspects of the internet and information technologies is the free flow of public data that comes with connecting people all around the world. The easily accessible knowledge gives us, modern humans, way more resources to strengthen our expertise in any niche. Easy pathways to valuable information not only make our education and pursuit of data far more efficient but also stimulate further technological solutions that contribute to exponential progress that affects every area of our lives.
In a business environment, because every competitor has the same access to public information, the ones that collect and analyze data faster will triumph over other companies. With bigger ambitions, the demand for data only keeps growing.
Web scraping is the most popular approach to aggregating large amounts of public data from websites of interest. Most businesses and even individual tech enthusiasts use scraping in their everyday lives because collected information has multiple ways to positively affect different business tasks. It can improve your digital marketing campaigns, provide efficient insight and user response for the development and maintenance of modern products and software.
The success of today’s businesses can dwindle without adaptation and modernization. Companies that utilize the tools for data extraction have a much clearer insight into the targeted market, its demands, and the success of their competitors. In this article, we will focus on the process of web scraping and other forms of data aggregation. With no regard to user privacy, companies see information as the most valuable resource and utilize many ways to acquire data for business operation improvement or for sale. We will also discuss proxy servers, their use for both data collection and privacy protection, as well as proxy prices. To learn more, look up Smartproxy – a credible provider to learn more about the service and what deals might suit your needs. But for now, let’s focus on data extraction.
Why do we need web scraping?
With so much public data available with a few clicks of a button, companies and individuals can improve their products, software, marketing strategies, and other business-related tasks. Information brings precision which can bring many competitive advantages and make you stand out in your craft. Because so many processes today are digitalized, information helps us utilize technical knowledge to create the most optimal solutions.
Because companies benefit from data extraction in different ways, web scraping is an inseparable part of a modern business environment. What may give a bad reputation to this particular method of data extraction is unethical scraping. Collecting public data is not illegal, but hackers and other cybercriminals may look for security cracks to extract and expose valuable private information.
Why do companies need proxy servers?
Companies that use web scraping can benefit from proxy servers in many ways. By checking for the best proxy prices and providers that suit their needs, businesses protect web scraping operations and their network identity. Even if you engage in legitimate web scraping, you will encounter competitors and other scraping targets that oppose public data extraction.
Businesses have every right to impose those protections. For a thorough web page analysis, real human traffic is the most authentic source of data. Companies want to see how their presented platform communicates with real visitors, and bot traffic can disrupt these metrics. Furthermore, scraping bots send a lot more data requests than a user connecting through a browser – that’s what makes them so efficient. But web scrapers that aggressively extract all information on a website can slow down and even crash the server, ruining the experience for others.
Proxy servers allow us to bypass these limitations. Some web owners tailor their protections to minimize any chance of successful scraping and ban a detected IP address on the spot. If you send a scraping bot request through a proxy server, you can find the right settings for successful extraction without putting your main IP at risk.
But proxy servers have other applications. By setting up a reverse proxy, you can use it as a gateway to your website to avoid IP exposure and have more control of the incoming traffic. Even if you do not care about web scraping, everyone can benefit from this service.
When web scraping is not enough
Unfortunately, we have a lot of companies that abuse their software and even hardware to collect personalized data for sale. Facebook is one of the popular cases of sale of information that shocked the world, but we still have many companies that harvest user data without disclosure. Overwolf, a popular platform that builds and distributes in-game apps to provide more information, claims that they only collect hardware data and computer performance but there have been numerous accusations of extreme data collection for sale.
Such information extraction highlights the greed of many tech companies. Because data is so valuable, they no longer see clients as customers, but rather as products. Even if you want to create a smart home with simple IoT devices, they can be another tool to siphon your personal data to developers. Even if these companies do not need to benefit from such information, they will still gather and sell customer data and buy more valuable data from scrapers. The more our lives depend on technology, the more privacy we have to give up. If you feel uncomfortable about the magnitude of data extraction, we recommend limiting or avoiding IoT devices and reading the privacy policy of devices and software you buy, so you can at least avoid disclosed data collection.