Sure, it can be! Also, as some people have already pointed out, this is often a gray area where people go beyond violating ToS. Some good examples are privacy v

Sure, it can be! Also, as some people have already pointed out, this is often a gray area where people go beyond violating ToS. Some good examples are privacy violations (scraping personal data), credentials stuffing etc. Recently, there is a boom of "anti-bot" services. These are essentially SaaS businesses that "protect" websites from being scraped by automated software. As you onboard the first customer who wants to extract data from a bot-protected website, you are going to run into an unlimited waterfall of stupid troubles. Your bots will be blocked, will consume excessive amount of data, kill your CPU/GPU performance. I have shared some highlights on how to bypass these recently on HN [1], but it is sadly only the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, since the post has been featured on HN I have been reached by more than 50 companies and individuals whose business operating model is based solely on data extraction/automated scraping. These are (in my opinion) successful companies, and two out of these are part of YC. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060272