Legal. Europe.

Privacy and Data.

Data we collect is information on social media platforms meaning the individual intends the data to be seen by anyone and everyone. Once personal data are publicly available for reuse, it will be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to have any form of control on the nature of potential use. This is especially the case if the data are available in digital, searchable, and machine-readable format and have been published on the internet. Public information can also be seen, accessed, or downloaded through third-party services such as search engines, APIs, and offline media such as TV, and by apps, websites.

In most countries, law enforcement specifically for web scraping is not clearly defined yet. However, with the onset of GDPR regulations, more and more people have realized the need to comply with legal standards before proceeding with a scraping project to avoid falling into a tricky legal situation. As international legal circumstances vary widely, this article only discusses the legal risks of web scraping in the United States and Europe.

Web scraping, also called web crawling, screen scraping, or web data extraction, is the grabbing of data from web pages with or without the consent of the site’s webmaster. As a trending term in the data-dominated era, web scraping, combined with the power of automation, offers a scalable way to access, rank, collect, organize, and analyze the huge amount of documentation and data on the web. Modern web scrapers have streamlined the process of data extraction and thus saved us from the repetitive work of copy-pasting.

The possibilities around web scraping are enormous. As one of the cornerstone technologies of the Internet world, web scraping lays the foundation for modern search engines. The Google Search database, for example, is built entirely out of scraping results. Web crawlers from Google gather information from across hundreds of billions of web pages and organize it in the Search index. Businesswise, web scraping of smaller scales is used by businesses from a variety of backgrounds to harvest third-party data and harness it to extract significant insights.

LEGAL. USA.

USA, Legal and Privacy Laws pertaining to Web scrapping.

In the US, the law regarding web scraping is still developing and implicates a large number of statutory regimes and areas of common law. There are major types of legal claims that website owners can use to avoid undesired web scraping. For example, web-scraping activity may implicate federal statutes, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and insider trading laws; state blue sky laws; privacy laws; and common law claims, such as breach of contract, fraud, and trespass to chattels.

While web scraping for business has become a common practice, the legality of web scraping is still in a grey area. The versatility of web scraping allows access to data so easily that it would be natural to worry about potential information abuse or misuse. For people who want to decrease the likelihood of legal controversies in web scraping, it is important to identify the legal risks around web scraping.

Here comes the ultimate question: to scrape or not to scrape? Is web scraping illegal or not? What are the potential legal implications of using web scraping? Unfortunately, there is no short answer to these questions. Due to the relative novelty of web scraping in a legal context, the line between legitimate and evil use of this technique is still hard to define in most countries. For a decade or so, web scraping was only guided by a set of related, fundamental legal theories and laws, such as:

• Copyright Infringement

• Breach of Contract

• Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

• Trespass to Chattels