HACKER Q&A
📣 mohitc

Is Web Scraping Illegal?


Is web-scraping illegal? Does this also vary from country to country?

To be more specific: If I extract data from a website to be displayed in my App/Website, data which is publicly available and not extracted from a login or a workflow... is that a problem?

  👤 forgotmypw17 Accepted Answer ✓
I am not a laywer, and this is not legal advice.

There was a high-profile case, brought by LinkedIn, and it was ruled against them, setting precedent, at least in the U.S., that scraping is allowed.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

👤 argimenes
Scraping data shouldn't be any more illegal than reading; but publishing that data without consent may or may not be legal.
👤 pimterry
If you're scraping personal data - e.g. people's names, email addresses, employment info or similar - then you probably fall under GDPR here, unless you can somehow exclude all EU users from scraping entirely. Companies have been fined for this, e.g. Poland fined a small marketing firm £200,000 for scraping in 2019: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/30/covert-data-scraping-on-wa...