I scrape my own bank and financial aggregator to have a self hosted financial tool. I scrape my health insurance to pull in data to track for my HSA. I scrape Strava to build my own health reports.

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How so? Shouldn't that information be behind quite a few layers of security?

[–] chaospatterns@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I developed my own scraping system using browser automation frameworks. I also developed a secure storage mechanism to keep my data protected.

Yeah there is some security, but ultimately if they expose it to me via a username and password, I can use that same information to scrape it. Its helpful that I know my own credentials and have access to all 2FA mechanisms and am not brute forcing lots of logins so it looks normal.

Some providers protect it their websites with bot detection systems which are hard to bypass, but I've closed accounts with places that made it too difficult to do the analysis I need to do.