The growth of artificial intelligence has intensified the automated extraction of publicly accessible online data for model training, commercial analysis, and competitive intelligence. In response, organizations and content creators are increasingly considering defensive data-poisoning techniques that provide scrapers with misleading, synthetic, or strategically distorted information. While these measures may help protect valuable digital resources, they also raise ethical concerns involving deception, stakeholder harm, downstream data contamination, and damage to the wider information ecosystem. This review…
