I did a project in the past that involved scraping non-mainstream e-commerce sites and we encountered this mindset. Durr, what? Yer want to take all mah data?? It ended up easier to just write the scrapers than to explain what we were doing to Neanderthals.
> Durr, what? Yer want to take all mah data?? It ended up easier to just write the scrapers than to explain what we were doing to Neanderthals.
As demeaning and offensive many people would find that statement to be, I still found it to be the sad reality most of the time.
Plus my local community is much smaller and I would not want vengeful businessmen who understand NOTHING from what I am trying to achieve, to actively sabotage me. They can easily call my ISP and deny me service, for example.
So I opted for ethical scraping without asking questions. Seems to be the best working compromise.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Let's bathe in the confirmation bias it dips us in. :D
