A researcher is interested in the relationship of weather to sentiment on Twitte

Question

A researcher is interested in the relationship of weather to sentiment on Twitter. They want to scrape data from www.wunderground.com and join that to Tweets in that geographic area at a particular time. One complication is that Weather Underground limits the number of data points that can be downloaded for free using their API (application program interface) The researcher sets up six free accounts to allow them to collect the data they want in a shorter time-frame. What ethical guidelines are violated by this approach to data scraping?

Explanation / Answer

1. Scraping often violates the terms of service of the target website.

2. It might encourage Plagiarism

3. It might be a paid website and hence, accessing it by making six free accounts can be considered unethical.

But overall, if you're pulling data from a publicily available database using API interface, it cannot be termed as illegal or unethical. It is a publicily available thing that means anyone and everyone can use it as needed.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse A
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.