When you publish data on the web you're making the data available for folks to use for their own purposes. If you don't want folks to use the data, don't publish it. But what if publishing the data is a profitable service you are providing in an open environment (ie the World Wide Web) - how to prevent someone from getting all your data and setting up simalar service? In reality you can't. If the data is published then a determined individual will be able steal it. But you can make it difficult and unpleasant to the point that your adversary would rather pay you for the data.

While security has not been a main focus in the development of WebDataServer, it does have a couple of features which are useful. First since the returned data is inside an html document, making a database out of it will take significant parsing. Also by setting the MaxMaxReturn config parameter to a reasonably low value you can limit the amount of data available in a single request, thus requiring extra effort to retrieve all your data. Most importantly though you can limit how data is retreived from WebDataServer by specifying Required fields in your config file. User requests are rejected is they do not include values for Required fields.