While web scraping is not inherently illegal, how it is conducted and the data's subsequent use can raise legal and ethical concerns. Actions such as scraping copyrighted content and personal information without consent or engaging in activities that disrupt the normal functioning of a website may be deemed illegal.

Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others. In general, it is used by people and businesses who want to make use of publicly available web data to generate valuable insights and make smarter decisions.

The most straightforward way to scrape data from a website is to manually copy data from the source and analyze it. Browser developer tools. Browsers have many built-in tools to inspect and extract website elements. One example is the inspect function, which shows the website's underlying source code.