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Mozilla Foundation Calls on Tech Industry to Block ICE Contractor
(www.404media.co)
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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Technology
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How exactly does a website stop a web scraper specifically from a org?
I mean isn't that the whole point of web scraping? That if it's publicly available, anybody, including people like ICE, will find a way to get the data?
Yeah, it's not technically impossible to stop web scrapers, but it's difficult to have a lasting, effective solution. One easy way is to block their user-agent assuming the scraper uses an identifiable user-agent, but that can be easily circumvented. The also easy and somewhat more effective way is to block scrapers' and caching services' IP addresses, but that turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You could also have a paywall or login to view content and not approve a certain org, but that only will work for certain use cases, and that also is easy to circumvent. If stopping a single org's scraping is the hill to die on, good luck.
That said, I'm all for fighting ICE, even if it's futile. Just slowing them down and frustrating them is useful.