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PULPOU BLOG
From the United States to Mexico in a matter of seconds
El ‘web scraping’ es una herramienta de la cual muchos vendedores ilegales se nutren para comercializar en marketplaces. De qué se trata y qué hay que hacer para evitar el robo de información vital para nuestro negocio.
Technology, in essence, is neither good nor bad. It depends on how it is used. However, on many occasions, it indirectly facilitates certain processes that stimulate the proliferation of illicit activities, such as illegal sales. This way, a pirate seller can obtain valuable data and information in just a matter of seconds.
Through web scraping tools, more and more sellers are reposting listing content from platforms like Amazon and eBay in the United States to other marketplaces in Mexico and other Latin American countries. This rapidly multiplies illegal products in markets where counterfeit control is more lax.
A Phenomenon in Expansion
Javier Maestre, from the Argentine firm Maestre Abogados, explains that web scraping software is responsible for collecting data from web pages, which may or may not be structured. "Then, this software is capable of offering the information to the user in an organized manner so that they can process it more efficiently," the specialist elaborates.
In the same vein, the lawyer emphasized that "nowadays there are numerous tools that perform this activity, whose specific functionalities depend on the intended use of the information. These programs organize the downloaded information to process the data it contains automatically."
This type of software can be used to copy product listing information from marketplaces. In a matter of seconds, you could have organized and structured data that allows you to transfer everything extracted from Amazon, for example, to another sales platform, such as Mercado Libre.
In the hands of an illegal seller, this can be a dangerous weapon, as it would allow them to create product listings with information extracted from official sellers without having the original products or the quantity of stock that a valid account might have.
Maestre explains that these tools, in the wrong hands, can be used for this purpose and clarifies that "there are many pages, such as product comparison sites, that presumably make use of these types of tools."
He also adds: "Depending on the case, the use of web scraping techniques could constitute intellectual property infringements, sui generis database rights infringements, and could even be considered an act of unfair competition or a data protection infringement if personal data is involved."
How to Protect Yourself from Web Scraping
Maestre Abogados states that if a website wants to protect itself from these initiatives, the first thing it must do is anticipate these circumstances in its terms of use and specify what specific uses it allows for the information it makes available to the public on its website.
On the other hand, they complement, secondly, there can be "technical measures that make these capture actions difficult but may be hard to prevent entirely in practice." He mentions tools such as the use of cookies or JavaScript, introducing captchas, setting request and connection limits, detecting and blocking known malicious sources, among others.
They can also implement solutions to detect the use of these tools and, if necessary, obtain evidence for possible subsequent legal actions, such as introducing false or erroneous content for later monitoring."
However, the professional adds that more than thinking about protecting against data capture, the focus should be on the intended uses of the information to be avoided, as "although there may be technical measures that make it difficult, it cannot be guaranteed that it will be completely prevented in practice."
For example, if the aim is to prevent the use of photographs on other pages, there are steganography techniques that allow for the later identification of those images on third-party pages. "That is, depending on the specific content we want to protect, the uses we want to prevent, and the available budget, there are numerous actions that can be considered," the lawyer concludes.
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