Q&A with Denas Grybauskas, Head of Legal at Oxylabs Vast amounts of data are being collected every minute with the help of web scraping. From product prices on different online shops to SEO keyword rankings – public web data allows businesses to make both tactical and strategic decisions, which helps them outperform their competitors. However, collecting such data comes with responsibility. Besides being a sensitive issue in itself, data gathering lacks comprehensive legal regulation or clear industry consensus between what is acceptable and what is not. Denas Grybauskas, the Head of Legal at a leading public web data gathering solutions…
Author: Denas Grybauskas
Web scraping is something enigmatic in the public’s eye. It’s not entirely surprising – every innovative solution takes some time before it’s understood and accepted. Generally, widespread acceptance closely follows industry-related legislation or regulation. However, web scraping is immensely useful for the public good. Anything that slows down its adoption among the wider public is causing harm in the long term. In this article, I’ll argue that any dedicated regulation, at least industry self-regulation, would be beneficial for the world at large. Someone’s money versus everyone’s money In any free-market economy, private capital spending is fairly unrestricted. Public money, on…