Is web scraping legal?

 

There has been a great talk about the legality of the scraping information from internet in past decade since the boom of IT specially the automation. Companies in marketing and other business sectors were hunting the data from all available sources but there question was always there that is scraping legal at all? This discussion was not only among the netizens but many courts in UK, Europe and USA discussed the legality of this for many years and different rulings has been passed depending upon the nature of data but none have banned them in any country.

Here we need to understand what kind of data we can scrape or use and what kind of data are illegal to scrape. Globally the data has been divided into two major categories as mentioned below:

•        Publically available data
•        Private/Personal data

Publically Available Data:

Publically available data is associated to the companies data, business sector data and/or real estate data.

This kind of data is mostly advertised on business directories, maps or public or government databases by the companies themselves to get digital exposure. This data is legal to scrape all around the work and laws allow you to get and use this data for marketing or business purposes.

Private/Personal data

According to GDPR the definition of personal data is as follows “Personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person”.

Although this data is not publically available on any directories but sometimes this data comes online stolen or sold by different apps or websites. Recently, due to increasing trend of using social media, sometimes users publish their information on the websites like Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn as well and can be easily scraped from there sources at small level.

But scraping this data is not legal in most of the world, except California where you can scrape this information if published by the user itself on his/her profile from 2023. Therefore for time being is a good practice to deal with personal data and lets just focus on business-to-business data which in itself is a big field and still has unknown dimensions to explore.

Ethics of Scraping

Even if you are dealing with public records which is totally legit to scrape Scraping solution still uses some ethics in its process of web scraping to keep things transparent and ethical and if you are dealing with scraping you should consider these as well

• • Always use API to get the data if given through API rather than scraping all data from front end

• • Do not publish the data you scraped as it is on any medium

• • Do not send too many requests that effect the performance of the website or that looks like a DDOS attack

• • Always provide User-Agent strings as this allows the site owner to know that you only want to scrape their publically available data

• • If possible, seek permission from owner if it’s an ecommerce website

• • Always be ethical when using someone else data and don’t try to steal the value of data