5 Things That You Should Know Before Data Extraction

The corporate world is magnetized to draw data for achieving breakthroughs. The research firms such as IDC and focus groups stay in the want of data. Likewise, there are corporate giants such as IBM, Amazon and a lot more that incline to data for finding opportunities and discovering innovations. Their digital process of mining patterns of behavior and web journey data requires data, which is extracted through tools and manually.

Here are five things that you should know before opting for extraction:    

1. Scraping allowed or disallowed?

The internet uses protocols to protect data from duplicity. Amid malicious hacking trends, protocols are the best tweak to bet on for protecting the originality. A short for robots.txt, the robot exclusion standard is a well-defined set of rules to communicate or cease communication between web crawlers and other web robots. It specifically informs the web robot to carry out screening or discarding scanning the webpage during crawling for indexing.

The organisations in the web scraping domain straight away access the “robot file”, which are located at the root of the website host. You can put this tweak to determine its presence-Put “http:// www.example.com/robots.text”.

The text- “User-agent: Disallow:/” bars all automated scrapers from extracting data. The robot standard locks or unlocks the access to crawlers. If it shows “disallow”, you should skip it, as its digging would be unethical. You could be litigated for infringing the data guidelines.

1. Take prior permission in writing:

Despite being denied, the scraping is permissible, provided that you have asked for crawling into. If you access Facebook with the same proposition, let’s say, it warns with a pop up message-“Crawling Facebook is prohibited unless you have express written permission”.

This practice is generally followed by almost all websites. Their technical content is typically written and long enough to deprive of reading it. But, it’s no excuse to get rid of reading it. Logically, you should go ahead and take permission beforehand, because it is the best way of avoiding prospective legal actions. Otherwise, their teams screen and tap your actions, which lead to litigation.

1. Tools to extract data through APIs

APIs, aka Application Programming Interfaces, are a set of functions and procedures, which allow accessing data repositories of an operating system, application or any other service. These interfaces permit people to retrieve large-scale data through automated processes.

Now-a-days, hundreds of companies are lingering on public APIs as a mode of information about users. The researchers and third party app developers filter this information through the data mining process. As a result, the customer behavior, marketing patterns and trends become no alien to data analysts. This is how productive business intelligence shapes up. The extracted data seize samples to analyse individuals, groups and society for exploring new opportunities.

But, a few ones like Cambridge Analytica dig it with malicious intentions. Their intentions are inspired by huge substantial benefits. Even then also, marketers, think tanks and strategists are there who need information for discovering breakthroughs for the good reasons. There comes the web scraping tools to extract data. Even though the APIs are inaccessible, the web scraping tools are capable of capturing and extracting intended data.

1. Keep GDPR into account

General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is a data policy that was enforced to ban the use of personal data unless the data subject allows. Being effectuated in May 2018, it proved a turning point by creeping in changes in almost every domain. The data policies are made disciplined, which did not happen in 20 years.

Now, the regulation has interestingly forced organisations, especially the data mining and tech firms like Facebook and Google, to stop blindfolded harnessing of consumers’ data. They are pressed to show their compliance with the law if they want to avoid hefty penalty worth €10 million or 2% of the company's global annual turnover of the last FY, whichever is higher. Moreover, the level 2 imposes €20 million or 4% of the company's global annual turnover of the previous financial year as a penalty for breaching the law, whichever is higher.  

So, you should keep this compliance into account. Focus on the fact that this compliance is meant for using identities, email ids or Personally Identifiable Information (PII), not the other ones. The timestamps, web journey, purchase patterns and transactions are still spared to be accessed for business analysis. You can extract these details for business intelligence.

1. Look for alternative sources

Avoid such URLs that deny automated crawlers to enter. Rather, search for the alternative ones. There are many vendors who sell the contacts and leads legally over the internet. In the meantime, the option of data extraction is still open. You can look for the sources that deal in the same domains. Ask for the permission to access the APIs.