The GDPR doesn't state that web scraping is illegal; however, it restricts what businesses can do with the contact data they wish to extract. For example, in some cases, in order to gather personal data and use it for various purposes, they have to receive explicit consent from the data subjects.

Using fingerprinting to detect web scraping Application Security Manager (ASM) can identify web scraping attacks on web sites that ASM protects by using information gathered about clients through fingerprinting or persistent identification.

By scraping locations like an online employee directory, a scraper is able to aggregate contact details for bulk mailing lists, robo calls, or malicious social engineering attempts. This is one of the primary methods both spammers and scammers use to find new targets.

Cloudflare Bot Management is designed to block content scraping attacks, along with bot mitigation for other kinds of malicious traffic.