Question: I'm looking for a tool that can help me gather public web data efficiently and responsibly, while adhering to privacy rules.

If you're looking for an all-purpose tool to harvest public web data in a responsible and efficient way, Bright Data is a good option. The service offers a variety of tools for harvesting public web data, including a network of more than 72 million residential proxy IPs, automated session management and tools like Unlocker to bypass CAPTCHAs. It also offers retail competitive intelligence that's designed to be privacy compliant. Bright Data has flexible pricing and a lot of resources, so it's good for e-commerce and real estate.

Another option is Apify, a cloud-based service for web scraping and browser automation. With more than 1,600 prebuilt tools and templates, Apify lets you quickly build reliable web scrapers. It supports multiple libraries, has proxy management with IP rotation, and integrates with hundreds of other apps. Its tiered pricing, including a free plan, means it's good for businesses and developers who want to automate web scraping and browser automation for AI and data science projects.

If you want an AI-powered option, Zyte has a powerful service with managed data extraction and smart proxies. It can handle a wide variety of data types, and it's got features like auto-crawling and proactive ban handling. Zyte's custom pricing plans make it a good option for businesses and developers that want high accuracy and efficiency for web data harvesting.

If you don't want to write any code, Simplescraper is a graphical tool that lets you extract data without programming. With cloud automation, API generation and support for lots of websites, Simplescraper is good for market research and data scraping. It's got a free plan and paid plans with extra features like proxy rotation and auto-retries, so it's good for developers and noncoders.