tiramichu

When I fly long distance I always make the effort to go in the (plane) bathroom and freshen up, brush my hair and such before I get there because I feel I get less hassle from immigration when I’m looking fresh as opposed to when I’m a red-eyed mess.

Despite the fact it should be perfectly expected for people to look like shit after a long-haul flight.

As you say, It’s just human bias and people are affected by their biases even in roles where they should try not to be.

If you want to refer specifically to web scraping then call it “web scraping” or “site scraping” or “HTML scraping”

Not difficult to get your meaning across.

Scraping has multiple meanings.

Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.

The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:

• the data harvesting is automated
• the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don’t have explicit permission to use it
• the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data

Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.

A non-cynical answer would be that for important financial or legal transactions, companies consider mail to be the most certain and binding, and the higher standard of evidence.

A cynical answer would be that mail-only processes exist to dissuade you from using them.

You’ll often find that accounts and services can be opened digitally but to close them you need to mail or phone. This is to make the company more money.

In cases where an organisation has to provide you information legally and can’t charge you for it, that might also be done by mail to encourage you to not bother.

For things like digital person-to-person money transfers, Europe solved that long ago by making bank transfers free and easy. In the US bank transfers are often a paid service, which is why people are still sending cheques to each other, and why the US has such a plethora of money-sending apps and companies all after a slice of the pie.

TL;DR - Money

Ding ding! Nailed it.

Inflate apparent views across the board while simultaneously making it harder for creators to get paid.