What is data harvesting and how can you prevent it?

Data harvesting, especially through techniques like data scraping, has transformed how businesses operate and make decisions.

Unfortunately, the same data collection methods that provide such valuable insights can also be exploited for malicious purposes by fraudsters, resulting in breaches to company and customer privacy.

To safeguard their sensitive data, businesses must stay informed on the dark side of data harvesting. Understanding its potential to harm customers, operations, and revenue — along with the cybersecurity solutions available for protection — can help mitigate these dangers.

Data harvesting is the process of collecting data from a given source, such as websites, apps, and social media, and leveraging that information to draw inferences.

A common technique involves deploying bots to collect user information—including contact details, personal data, and payment information—often without the user’s awareness. This bot-powered harvesting is also known as data scraping.

Essentially, data harvesting is a method for gaining insights into specific individuals, consumer groups, and even the larger public. Businesses, for instance, engage in this form of data collection to display relevant ads to their users.

While this practice is often done for legitimate reasons, the flipside is also true. Data harvesting has become a go-to tactic for fraudsters, looking to steal sensitive information from customers and companies alike.

Let’s illustrate a scenario to better understand data harvesting and how sites that collect personal data can turn into a hackers’ paradise.

Imagine a new social media platform. Many people are so excited and impatient to join that they scroll through the privacy agreement without pausing to read. As a result of their inattention, these users are unaware the app is harvesting significant data for targeted advertising and content—such as date of birth, contact information, recent purchases, visited sites, and even their approximate location.

While this collected data may enhance the in-app user experience, it also poses significant risk should a data breach occur, landing this information in the wrong hands. That duality shows how data harvesting can result in both short-term benefit and long-term damage—for businesses and who they serve.

Decreased Customer Trust

When customers learn their personal information was compromised, the likely outcome is a loss of trust in the business. After a data harvesting attack, rebuilding this trust can be a long and costly process.

Depending on the breach’s severity, the consequences can be short- or long-term, including broken customer loyalty, decreases in sales, and public damage to the brand reputation.

Lawsuits and Regulatory Penalties

In the event of fraudulent data scraping, businesses may face legal action from customers, partners, or regulatory bodies.

High legal fees, settlements, and fines can financially debilitate a company. Plus, failing to comply with data protection regulations (ex. GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA) can result in severe penalties.

Lawsuits and Regulatory Penalties

In the event of fraudulent data scraping, businesses may face legal action from customers, partners, or regulatory bodies.

High legal fees, settlements, and fines can financially debilitate a company. Plus, failing to comply with data protection regulations (ex. GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA) can result in severe penalties.

Exposure of Confidential Information

Additional safety and business concerns arise when fraudsters opt to leak harvested data. Any exposure of sensitive information—such as customer details, strategic plans, or product designs—can harm both the affected individuals and the company’s credibility and operations.

For instance, if internal documents are publicly leaked, or a competitor’s website is scraped, malicious actors could use this data to copy a business’s products, undercut pricing, or otherwise harm their competitive edge. These actions could result in additional revenue loss, as well as a weakened market position.

Wasted Infrastructure Spend

After a data harvesting attack occurs, businesses are forced to invest heavily in new security to safeguard their data and prevent future breaches. These hefty, unexpected costs can cause financial strain and divert resources from other critical business areas.

While investing in preventative measures may have blocked this breach, the company budget is now spread thinner to accommodate post-disaster cybersecurity tools, IT infrastructure, and staff training.

Fraudulently Copied Websites

Using the harvested data, fraudsters can create duplicate websites that mimic legitimate e-commerce sites to deceive customers. Users will unknowingly put themselves at risk by providing their log-in credentials and financial information to these imposter sites.

This type of phishing attack can further damage a business’s reputation and cause a ripple effect leading to more data theft after the initial breach.

Skewed Web Analytics

Data-harvesting bots often generate a large amount of fake traffic and distort web analytics with their flurry of online activity. By believing this traffic is generated by real users, businesses may make poor strategic decisions as a result.

Working from inaccurate data can lead to ineffective marketing campaigns, misguided product development, and incorrect customer insights.

Yes, data harvesting is preventable — but only if you have the right measures in place.

One effective solution is HUMAN Scraping Defense. Stopping web scraping bots in their tracks on websites, mobile apps, and APIs, the solution detects and blocks malicious scraping attacks to protect your data from harvesting. It leverages advanced machine learning, behavioral analysis, and intelligent fingerprinting to identify bots with exceptional accuracy.

How vigilant is our solution? Scraping Defense is part of the Human Defense Platform, which verifies more than 20 trillion interactions every week. To put this into perspective, it would take a human being over 31,000 years just to count to 1 trillion, let alone 20 trillion.

Certain industries are targeted more often by data hackers due to the high volume of sensitive data they handle. Some of the most vulnerable sectors include:

• Healthcare
• Financial services
• E-commerce
• Education
• Government
• Travel and hospitality
• Telecommunications

That being said, collecting any amount of data comes with associated risks. Implementing protective solutions that detect and mitigate scraping bots on your websites, mobile apps, and APIs—such as Scraping Defense—can block an attack before damage occurs.

Request a demo today to learn more. Discover how the HUMAN solutions can protect your business from malicious data harvesting.