If you’re a developer, chances are in your career you’ve written a web scraper before. You either did it for a personal project, learning exercise or you were asked by someone else to build a scraper. My first freelancer job was a scraper on Freelancer.com years and years ago.

There is often confusion around the legality of scraping and it’s not illegal to scrape public data. This was further reinforced by the case of hiQ vs LinkedIn which ruled it is legal to scrape public data.

Legality aside (because we already established it’s not illegal), let’s talk about the ethics. As a scraper, you’re not obligated to abide any of these ethics of scraping, but it is the right thing to do.

#opinion