Public works schedules a nightly automated crawl of a paving contractor's website, including paths the site's robots.txt already lists as disallowed. What is the professional OSINT choice?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Robots.txt is more like a 'please use the front door' sign than a vault lock—but a city still does not kick in the side door on a nightly timer. Professional website OSINT stays polite: skip automated grabs of paths the site asked crawlers not to hit. If a page matters, retrieve it the way a careful human would, not as a bulk job that ignores the sign.
Full Explanation
robots.txt is not a cryptographic control, yet civic researchers still treat it as a professionalism and rate-limit cue. Nightly automation of disallowed paths is indiscriminate collection and can look like abuse even when the HTML is public. PORP-style website OSINT prefers bounded, attributable retrieval over defeating crawl rules. Document the robots file as context, then collect only what the engagement actually needs through ordinary public access.