Many companies are interested in online brand protection. This has become hard to secure, as bad actors use practices such as data scraping to secure proprietary information, and therefore diminish brands. Fortunately, businesses can take measures that can ensure privacy online, and keep an online reputation secure.

Companies are more vulnerable to data scraping than ever before. According to Wikipedia, data scraping is a technique where computer programs extra data from human readable output from another program, such as an IP address. Data scraping and web data mining present greater challenges than they did a few years ago. In 2000, just 361 million people used the Internet, or two thirds of Facebook users today. Now, almost three billion people are online, and many want to steal the data of others.

There are ways to protect corporate privacy against data scraping. Virtual private network software, or VPN software, can let a business use a remote desktop or mobile device without interception. There is also anti tracking software that allows users to do anonymous browsing on the web. In fact, anti tracking software has grown from 17 million to 28 million users in January 2013. Many individuals use it to guard against irresponsible advertisers. With increasing sophistication, corporations can use it to hide IP addresses and other activities.

Data scrapping will always be a problem, especially as the Internet expands. Fortunately, businesses do not have to go online unprotected. Use software to ensure corporate privacy, businesses can guard against data scraping, and have greater Internet freedom. To find a software vendor, an IT department need to do no more than search around. See more.