Data scraping or Web scraping may be liked or despised, depending on who you ask. It has been around for a long time and, in its best form, is a critical component of the internet. "Good bots" allow search engines to scan web information, price comparison businesses to save users money, and market researchers to evaluate social media opinion.

"Bad bots," on the other hand, retrieve content from a website to utilize it for reasons outside the site owner's control. Bad bots account for 20% of all web traffic. They carry out a wide range of harmful activities, including denial of service attacks, competitive data mining, online fraud, account hijacking, intellectual property theft, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, and digital ad fraud.