Page 45 - Cyber Warnings

4 ways in which profile scraping can affect social media

businesses

By Srilekha Veena Sankaran, Content Marketer, ShieldSquare

Social media is both a boon and bane for online businesses. On the brighter end, capitalizing on
social media will help online businesses extend their outreach and accrue customers swiftly.

On the flip side, breach of user privacy is one of the biggest threats faced by social media sites
as the technology to scrape user data has been evolving at an exponential rate.

Half of the internet traffic is driven by non-human traffic, including crawlers and malicious bots.

Profile scraping is a data-scraping technique in which bots are employed to scrape public
profiles from famous social media sites.

Scrapers use these profiles to enhance their competitive advantage in the market.

Renowned social media sites, despite having stringent ToS, are unable to put an end to profile
scrapers.

That being said, here are four good reasons why social media should shield themselves from
profile scraping:

1) A social media website’s content is the face of its thought leadership and brand
reputation. Scraping its user profiles will diminish the brand value

2) Social media websites run the risk of facing expensive lawsuits if their customers realize
that their data privacy has been breached

3) Scraping is illegal, and legal action can be taken by the site owner if their ToS is found to
be breached. However, automated bots use multiple IPs/ Proxies to scrape the profiles
and it is difficult to find the source of the bots.

This makes it all the more difficult to track the profile scraper, let alone sue the fraudster.

4) Profile scraping will result customer attrition. All the customer that invest in a social
media site to promote their businesses will shift their focus to another social media
bandwagon that ensures user and content privacy

45 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2016 Edition
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