this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence (blog.curiousquail.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by inari@piefed.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Scraping has multiple meanings.

Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.

The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:

  • the data harvesting is automated
  • the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don't have explicit permission to use it
  • the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data

Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.

[–] helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Sure. Fine. It means all of that now.

But what are we going to call the difficult thing that we have to do to coax, say, unstructured event listings into reasonably structured data?

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

If you want to refer specifically to web scraping then call it "web scraping" or "site scraping" or "HTML scraping"

Not difficult to get your meaning across.