The Mitigating Unauthorized Scraping Alliance (MUSA) brings together leading companies committed to protecting data from unauthorized scraping and misuse. In collaboration with industry members, policymakers, and the public, MUSA is generating a global dialogue around unauthorized data scraping focused on protecting user data through education, advocacy, public-private partnerships, and the sharing of reasonable practices to mitigate unauthorized scraping.
Through unauthorized scraping, threat actors collect public user data on a large scale to use outside of its original intent for their own personal and financial gain. This misuse has far-reaching impacts on both industry members and individual users. Both unauthorized scraping and the unauthorized use of scraped data decrease public trust, break privacy expectations, and threaten industry reputations. They can also lead to system slowdowns, increased costs, and the loss of control over user data. For consumers, unauthorized scraping reduces users’ control over their information and can lead to harmful spamming, fraudulent communication, identity targeting, surveillance, and unexpected disclosures of content intended to be temporary.
By collaborating with regulators and industry members to build and share practices for unauthorized scraping prevention, advocating for policies that address scraping, and educating the public on the harms of unauthorized scraping, MUSA offers a unified front for the protection of and enforcement against user data misuse.
MUSA is currently working to bring together member companies to align on common practices for unauthorized scraping mitigation. MUSA aims to publish an industry-aligned standard with the goal of making unauthorized scraping more difficult across member platforms, reducing the attack vector for scraping threat actors, and serving as a resource for media and policymaker engagement.
The issue of unauthorized scraping impacts a wide range of industries. Companies with platforms that are susceptible to scraping, or that have previously experienced scraping incidents, and companies interested in working together to combat the issue are encouraged to join. If you are interested in learning more about MUSA or becoming a member, please fill out our Membership Inquiry Form or contact us with questions.