HTTP vs HTTPS in web scraping ?

HTTPS is an encrypted version of the HTTP protocol. It implements end-to-end encryption between the client and the web server. However, when web scraping public data we don't care much about the security of the connection. We just need to make sure the data we're scraping is not blocked by the server.

HTTPS is susceptible to TLS fingerprinting (known as JA3 Fingerprint) which is used to detect web scrapers. So, scraping HTTPS endpoints is more difficult than scraping HTTP endpoints. If possible, scrapers perform much better when scraping unsecured HTTP websites.

Question tagged: HTTP

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