Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy, and denial of service

  • Authors:

  • Mike Thelwall;David Stuart

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1SB, United Kingdom;School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1SB, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Ethical aspects of the employment of Web crawlers for information science research and other contexts are reviewed. The difference between legal and ethical uses of communications technologies is emphasized as well as the changing boundary between ethical and unethical conduct. A review of the potential impacts on Web site owners is used to underpin a new framework for ethical crawling, and it is argued that delicate human judgment is required for each individual case, with verdicts likely to change over time. Decisions can be based upon an approximate cost-benefit analysis, but it is crucial that crawler owners find out about the technological issues affecting the owners of the sites being crawled in order to produce an informed assessment. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.