After news spread like wildfire last week that the data of 700 million LinkedIn users had been found for sale on the web, consumers quickly learned that the alleged data breach was actually the result of scraping. According to experts, this is different from a breach and cannot be easily prevented.
There is virtually nothing you can do to protect your online privacy
With a controversial history dating back to the 00s, data scraping (or web scraping) is essentially the automated collection of public data from websites on the internet. While not always bad depending on the use case, scraping can pose privacy risks when it comes to personal information.
“Everyone needs to realize that once you turn on your phone, your data goes everywhere,” Raffaele Mautone, CEO and founder of AaDya Security, a cybersecurity firm that works with small to medium-sized businesses, told Lifewire in a phone interview. “I tell people that all the time, and they’re shocked that they can’t protect their data somehow.”
According to Mautone, users often give up their rights to their data when they sign up for a new account online. This exposes the data to automated scraping programs that collect the data. Sometimes this data is then sold to companies or used for marketing purposes.
