Whenever you mention web scraping, you’re guaranteed to get mixed responses. Some people love web scraping. Others hate it.
The lovers will point to how using web data can make the world a better, more productive place. Whereas the haters will point to the harm web scraping supposedly causes.
Regardless of your views on web scraping ethics, this argument nearly always boils down to one question:
“Is web scraping legal?”
With high-profile legal cases like LinkedIn vs. HiQ bringing this question into the spotlight, we decided to write this guide to separate the passion from the facts and break down when web scraping is legal and when it is illegal in 2025.
Disclaimer: I am not your lawyer, and these comments are solely based on our experience working with thousands of clients to scrape the web. Please seek legal assistance if you are in doubt about your own particular project.
Is Web Scraping Legal Or Illegal?
Some people make blanket statements saying that web scraping is legal or illegal. These statements are often based on their own incentives. Be it web scrapers themselves arguing how web scraping is perfectly legal or corporate lawyers and anti-bot companies arguing the opposite.
In truth, there isn’t an easy yes or no answer to this question. It depends on the particular situation and the web scraping definition you’re using.
Here, we define web scraping activity simply as the process of collecting data across the internet. Scraping data from other websites is a useful and essential part of many legitimate data analysis operations.
Many people don’t realize that web scraping has been an integral part of the Internet since its early days. Search engines like Google fundamentally rely on web scraping technology—their crawlers continuously scan and index millions of web pages to find information instantly.
Beyond search engines, many of the tools and services we use daily depend on scraping techniques. For instance:
- Content aggregators and archives like the Wayback Machine use scraping to store snapshots of websites over time
- RSS feed aggregators like Feedly or Inoreader scrape and collect updates from various websites’ RSS feeds
- Price comparison tools like Honey and PriceGrabber use web scraping to gather pricing data from multiple ecommerce sites
Scraping isn’t just a convenience—it’s a necessity for organizing and accessing the vast amount of information on the web.
However, the use of web scraping also comes with ethical considerations, as it should always respect copyright laws, terms of service, and user privacy.
Key Factors That Affect the Legality of Scraping
Web data scraping itself isn’t illegal, but it can be illegal (or in a grey area) depending on these three things:
- The type of data you are scraping
- How you plan to use the scraped data
- How you extracted the data from the website
Numbers 1 & 2 are more clear-cut, so we will start here before tackling number 3, the tricky one.
What types of data are illegal to scrape?
Whether ecommerce, personal, or article data, the type of data you are scraping and how you plan to use it can have a huge bearing on its legality.
Unknown to many, the final use case of the data often has a significant impact on whether or not it is legal to scrape.
Sometimes, scraping a website can be perfectly legal, but how you intend to use the data can make it illegal.
That said, these are the two types of data we need to worry about:
- Personal Data
- Copyrighted Data
If the data you are scraping doesn’t match the above, then you are generally safe.
Data type #1: personal data
Personal data, or personally identifiable information (PII) as it is technically known, is any data that could be used to directly or indirectly identify a specific individual.
With the introduction of GDPR in 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the outrage that accompanied scandals such as Cambridge Analytica’s interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election, the issue of personal data has become a hot topic and one that every web scraper must be cognisant of.
Every legal jurisdiction has different regulations governing personal data. However, in general, in jurisdictions with the latest consumer privacy legislation (the European Union (EU), California, etc.), it is illegal for companies to obtain, store, and/or use someone’s personal data without their consent or without having a lawful reason for doing so.
Types of personal data include:
- Name
- Phone Number
- Address
- User Name
- IP Address
- Date of Birth
- Employment Info
- Bank or Credit Card Info
- Medical Data
- Biometric Data
In the vast majority of cases (lead generation, sales intelligence, etc.), when scraping personal data from a website you don’t have the consent of the data owner (the person whose data you are scraping) to scrape their data, and it’s very hard to argue you have one of these lawful reasons to do so:
- Consent – the data subject consented to us having their data.
- Contract – personal data is required to perform a contract with the data subject.
- Compliance – necessary for compliance with a legal obligation.
- Vital Interest, Public Interest, or Official Authority – typically only applicable for state-run bodies where access to personal data is in the public’s interest.
- Legitimate Interest – necessary for our legitimate interests.
As a result, scraping the personal data of a citizen of the EU or California could result in your web scraping being deemed illegal in most cases.
If you’re not extracting any personal data or just the personal data of non-EU or Californian citizens, you are likely safe to keep scraping.
Data type #2: copyrighted data
The second type of data you need to be careful of scraping is copyrighted data, which is data owned by businesses and individuals with explicit control over its reproduction and capture.
Like the use of copyrighted images and songs, just because the data is publicly available on the internet doesn’t mean it is legal to scrape it without the owner’s consent. You could be infringing the owner’s copyright by scraping their data.
This generally applies to the following types of web data:
- Articles
- Videos
- Pictures
- Stories
- Music
- Databases
Scraping copyrighted data itself isn’t illegal. It’s what you plan to do with the copyrighted data that could potentially make it illegal.
One person could scrape a copyrighted article, and it would be perfectly legal to do so. However, someone else could scrape the same article and be found to have breached the owner’s copyright.
It really depends on how you plan to use the data after you’ve scraped the data.
- Can you argue fair use? Instead of replicating the article in full, you plan to use snippets of the original article.
- Can you argue that the data is factual and, therefore, not copyrightable? Facts like product names, prices, features, etc., aren’t covered by copyright laws, so you can argue the data you plan to scrape is factual in nature.
A trickier aspect of copyright law, however, is the issue of database rights.
A database is an organized collection of materials that permits a user to search for and access individual pieces of information contained within the materials. This means that it can be illegal to scrape a full database from the web and then reproduce it exactly for your own purposes.
Again, the US and the EU have different regulations around what constitutes a database and what legal protections they give to the database owner. So, it is important to understand the rules and regulations for the legal jurisdictions you are scraping in.
The risks of infringing someone’s database rights can be mitigated by altering how the data is scraped and used. These two tips help ensure you’re conducting ethical data scraping with copyrighted data:
- Only scrape some of the available data;
- Do not replicate the organizational structure of the original database;
Okay, so far, we’ve covered what types of data can be illegal to scrape and have seen how you plan to use the scraped data can affect its legality.
Next, we’ll answer the most contentious issue about the legality of web scraping: how to extract data from the website.
Is web scraping itself illegal?
It’s pretty straightforward to determine if scraping personal or copyrighted data will make your web scraping illegal because there are clear laws that set out what is legal and what is illegal.
It gets a lot more tricky when it comes to the act of web scraping itself because no government has passed any law explicitly legalizing or de-legalizing web scraping.
Instead, we have to go off the verdicts of lawsuits between web scrapers and website owners, like:
To name a few.
The main issue in all these cases is whether the Terms of Service listed on many websites that forbid web scraping (or automatic access) are legally enforceable. Of course, there are no issues with websites that allow web scraping.
Although cases on the topic of web scraping have gone both ways, as of 2024, the courts are beginning to clarify the legality of data scraping for web scrapers.
Recent court decisions have generally supported scraping publicly available data. Most notably, in 2024, Meta’s lawsuit against Bright Data failed when the court found no evidence of wrongdoing in scraping public Facebook and Instagram data.
Note: This continues the trend from cases like HiQ vs. LinkedIn, which found that scraping data from a website doesn’t violate anti-hacking laws as long as the data is public.
This means that so long as the data is publicly available on a website and doesn’t require the web scraper to log in and explicitly accept the website’s terms of conditions, the web scraper is within its right to scrape the publicly available information.
So, how does this affect web scrapers?
If you are scraping a website, then you need to ask these questions to determine if it’s legal or not:
- Is the data publicly available? If the data isn’t hidden behind a login, the website’s terms and conditions aren’t enforceable, so you can legally scrape the public data.
- Do you need to create an account and log in to access the data? If this is the case, you need to examine the terms and conditions you agreed to when you created the account because by agreeing to them, you made them legally enforceable.
A lot of websites include in their Terms and Conditions (that you agree to when you create an account with their site) that they forbid you to scrape content from their site. So, as a rule of thumb, you should always assume that logging into a site and scraping is illegal unless you’ve examined their T&Cs.
That is why, at ScraperAPI, we forbid our users from scraping data behind the login wall.
What are the Laws that Apply to Web Scraping?
While no specific laws explicitly address web scraping, several important legal frameworks come into play when you collect data from websites. Make sure you understand these laws before scraping web data, as they set the boundaries for what’s acceptable and what’s not.
The GDPR and CCPA
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced in 2018, doesn’t explicitly forbid web scraping, but it places strict requirements on how you can handle personal information.
For example, if you’re scraping any personal data from European users, you need to have a lawful basis for doing so. This could mean either getting explicit consent (which is nearly impossible for most scraping projects) or having a legitimate interest that outweighs the privacy rights of the individuals involved.
Similarly, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) provides similar protections for California residents. Under the CCPA, if you’re scraping personal information about Californians, you need to:
- Inform users about what data you’re collecting
- Allow them to opt out of data collection
- Give them the right to request deletion of their data
- Provide rights to non-discrimination to exercise their privacy rights
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
The CFAA, initially passed in 1986 to combat computer hacking, has become increasingly relevant to web scraping activities in recent years.
While the CFAA doesn’t specifically mention web scraping, it prohibits “unauthorized access” to computer systems. This has led to several high-profile legal cases about whether web scraping constitutes unauthorized access.
The good news for web scrapers is that recent court decisions, particularly in the HiQ vs LinkedIn case, have clarified that accessing publicly available data doesn’t violate the CFAA.
Past Web Scraping Legal Cases and Their Results
Understanding the legality of web scraping becomes much clearer when you look at real court cases. These influential cases have set the rules businesses follow today when collecting data from websites.
Ryanair v. PR Aviation (2018)
When PR Aviation scraped flight prices from Ryanair’s website, the airline claimed this violated their terms of use. However, the Dutch court ruled in PR Aviation’s favor, making an interesting comparison: just like a shop can’t charge someone for reading a poster in their window, websites can’t automatically bind visitors to terms they haven’t explicitly agreed to.
Ryanair v. Expedia (2019)
The Ryanair-Expedia case highlighted how international boundaries affect web scraping laws. When Ryanair, an Irish airline, sued U.S.-based Expedia under the CFAA, the court established that U.S. laws could indeed apply to international scraping disputes. While the case ended in a confidential settlement, it notably resulted in Expedia removing Ryanair flights from their platform.
HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (2019)
HiQ Labs scraped LinkedIn’s publicly visible user profiles to offer analytics services. After LinkedIn blocked their access, HiQ sought legal protection. The court ruled in favor of HiQ, stating LinkedIn could not revoke access to public data. The ruling reinforced that scraping public information doesn’t violate the CFAA.
However, the story didn’t end there – HiQ’s later use of fake accounts led to a 2022 settlement restricting their scraping activities.
Meta v. Bright Data (2023)
In this recent high-profile case, Meta (formerly Facebook) sued Bright Data for scraping data from their social media platforms. However, the U.S. Federal court’s 2024 ruling favored Bright Data, finding no evidence they had scraped data from behind login walls. It reinforced the principle that scraping publicly available data remains generally permissible under current law.
The 3 Simple Steps to Ensure Your Web Scraping Is Legal
So there you go. We’ve discussed all the main issues that determine the legality of your web scraping. In most cases, we see what companies want to scrape is perfectly legal.
However, we always advise them to double-check their plans to ensure they’re conducting both legal and ethical web scraping with these three simple checks:
- Am I scraping personal data?
- Am I scraping copyrighted data?
- Am I scraping data from behind a login?
If your answer to all three questions is “No,” then your web scraping is legal.
However, if you answer “Yes” to any of them, you should take a step back and do a full legal review of your web scraping plan to ensure you’re not scraping it illegally.
FAQs about Web Scraping Legalities
Can you be sued for scraping data?
Yes, companies can sue you for web scraping, but winning such a lawsuit depends on how you scraped and used the data. Most lawsuits happen when scrapers collect personal information and copyrighted content or break a website’s terms of service they agreed to. The key is to follow the website’s terms of service and respect data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
What are the penalties for unlawful web scraping?
The penalties for illegal web scraping can hit hard on both legal and financial fronts:
- Copyright violations can cost you up to $150,000 per work if you scrape and use content without permission
- Breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) could land you with hefty fines, demands for compensation, and, in serious cases, jail time
Under privacy laws like GDPR, penalties can reach €20 million or 4% of your company’s global revenue. You could also face civil lawsuits for breach of contracts or website trespassing.
Is web scraping legal in the EU?
Web scraping in the Europe follows similar rules to other regions – it’s legal to scrape public data, but with important catches. The GDPR adds strict rules about collecting personal information, requiring explicit consent or legitimate interest. Courts have generally allowed scraping public information as long as you respect these privacy rules.
Is web scraping legal in the US?
Web scraping is generally legal in the US. You can scrape public data without violating the CFAA, but you must watch out for state laws like the CCPA in California. The key is avoiding personal data collection without consent and respecting copyright laws. If you’re scraping behind a login or agreed to terms that forbid scraping, you might run into legal trouble.
Is web scraping legal in the UK?
The UK follows similar principles to those of the EU regarding web scraping. Web scraping is legal, but the UK GDPR restricts how you handle personal data. Public information is generally fine to scrape, but you can’t ignore copyright laws or database rights. The courts look at whether you’re competing unfairly with the website owner and if you’re respecting users’ privacy rights.
Is web scraping GDPR compliant?
Web scraping can be GDPR compliant, but you must follow strict rules. If you’re collecting any personal data from EU residents, you must have a valid legal basis, like consent or legitimate interest. You must also inform people about data collection, store it securely, and give EU residents control over their information. Scraping non-personal, public data is much simpler and completely legal.
Is it legal to sell web scraped data?
Selling scraped data depends on what kind of data you’ve collected and how. Selling public, factual information like product prices or company details is usually legal. However, selling personal data or copyrighted content can get you in trouble. You’ll need to check privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, which might restrict data sales. Some websites also ban selling their data in their terms of service.
Can web scraping be detected?
Yes, websites can detect scraping through various methods. They track unusual patterns like too many requests from one IP, perfect timing between requests, or missing mouse movements. Modern websites use CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, and rate limiting to spot bots.
To avoid and bypass these challenges, scrapers can use web scraping APIs to get around these blocks by tuneling your traffic through proxies, handling CAPTCHAs automatically, and setting the right browser headers. Just remember, while these web scraping tools exist, it’s important to scrape responsibly and respect the website’s resources.
Do you need permission to scrape a website?
You don’t need permission to scrape publicly available data unless you agree to terms forbidding it. However, you should check the website’s robots.txt file and terms of service to ensure you’re not breaching any directives.