The Data Wars Revisited

Nearly eight years ago, Josh McHugh in a great Wired piece asked the question, Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You? The article examines the pros and cons of allowing small companies to scrape data.

In the nearly eight years since the publication of that piece, scraping data remains a controversial practice. To be sure, there's significant demand for tools that pull data from websites and return it in usable formats. Startups such as Grepsr, Krakio, promptcloud, and import.io allow non-technical users to grab data en masse from websites and create customized application program interfaces (APIs). Put differently, these go well beyond old-school copying and pasting.