A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. The purpose of creating such a site can be to collect advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine rankings by linking to other sites to improve their search engine ranking.
There are now some sites that are working on finding out even more information about you through scraping.
Scraping for Your Real Name
PeekYou.com has applied for a patent for a way to, among other things, match people’s real names to pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and online forums.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, they wrote about how scrapers broke into sites like PatientsLikeMe to find out information about patients to sell data about consumers to drug makers. To read this very interesting article, click here.
It is disturbing to think that people are in medial chatrooms pretending to be patients in order to find out what drugs are being prescribed. That kind woman you are chatting with about your hot flashes just may be a guy keeping track of your medical history. For information on how to remove some of your personal details from the Internet, check out wsj.com/wtk.
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