Data Scraping

Data scraping is the automated collection of information from websites, apps, documents or other sources by software that reads and extracts the data, rather than receiving it through an official feed. Web scraping tools load pages and pull out prices, text or tables; screen scraping reads what an application displays. In finance, scraping has been used to gather market prices, news and company filings for trading and research, and early account aggregation services scraped online banking pages using customers' passwords, a practice that open banking rules and the application programming interfaces they require were partly designed to replace. In crypto, analysts scrape exchanges, social media and blockchain explorers. Scraping can breach websites' terms of use or data protection laws, and criminals use it to harvest personal data for fraud. Also see Data Privacy.