Web Scraping Is Vital to Democracy
I think of web scraping as nothing less than automation of human work. There really is no hacking or unauthorized access involved. It's either me, using a browser, to read something publicly accessible on the internet, or it's my computer, which I've programmed to read those things for me, so I can focus on creative work or spend time with friends and family.<p>This applies not only to personal life, but businesses as well. Instead of hiring 100 interns to collect some data manually, you hire one programmer to automate that data collection process.<p>I think that the ability to automate tasks on the internet is absolutely crucial to further development of our society and limiting it in any way will be detrimental to the world as a whole. The amount of information these days is so vast, that no human labor force could possibly analyze that information and use it to drive our progress.<p>Disclaimer: We run a web scraping platform (<a href="https://apify.com" rel="nofollow">https://apify.com</a>)