Is Web Scraping Legal? Ethical Web Scraping Guide in 2025
If you are scraping web, you’ve probably already seen how it benefited your business. If your website is being scraped, then you may be angry with web scraping tools using your server resources and your information being used for others’ benefit. You may ask:
Is it legal?
Can your specific use case violate the rules?
Even if legal, is it ethical?
Would it harm your business’ reputation?
In this article, we will give you a short summary of major web scraping lawsuits, the latest legal status by country and common do’s and don’ts of web scraping to use it in a legal and ethical way.
Please note that this article is for informational purposes and should not be taken as legal advice. For your scraping projects, you are advised to get specific legal advice.
1. First things first: Is web scraping legal?
Short answer is, yes. Scraping publicly available information on the web in an automated way is legal as long as the scraped data is not
- Used for any harmful purpose.
- Used to directly harm the scraped website’s business or operations.
- Including Personally identifiable information (PII). There are data protection regulations around PII in many countries, the major ones being GDPR in EU and CCPA in California. There are no federal regulations about that in the US yet, but combination of different laws and state-level regulations often protect PII at federal level.
Therefore, it is important not to scrape personally identifiable information or even if scraped, businesses can mask and protect it with data enhancing technologies.
2. History of major web scraping lawsuits
Though web scraping can be legal, being scraped is not desired by companies. If these platforms can show that being scraped by a bot damages their infrastructure or operations, then that activity may be found illegal by the court.
3. Latest regulations of Web Scraping by Country
United States: There are no federal laws against web scraping in the United States as long as the scraped data is publicly available and the scraping activity does not harm the website being scraped. There is one specific act from 2016 against purchasing an excessive number of tickets at once using bots to prevent black markets.
European Union and the UK: EU recently has passed Digital Services Act, which aims to bring all EU countries under Digital Single Market sharing same regulations. According to Article 3 and 4 of this regulation, “reproduction of publicly available content” is not illegal.
This regulation approaches the topic more from intellectual property point of view, and needless to say, would find any web scraping involving personal data illegal due to GDPR. Apart from it, the situation is similar to the US in EU markets and the UK.
China: Within sources in English, there is no direct regulation against web scraping in China too. Similar to other countries, it seems like web scraping is used in China for business use cases as well and it is not legal to scrape and process personal data.
4. Dos and Don’ts of Legal and Ethical Web Scraping
From legal standpoint, one question businesses should ask themselves is whether their scraping act harm the scraped website. If the scraping activity:
Is too intense which can interrupt the services of the scraped website
The scraped data is used in a way to duplicate the activity or the service of that website, then even though regulations don’t exist
the website would have grounds to file a lawsuit against the scraper.
From an ethical standpoint, given that web scraping already has many use cases and professional providers in the market, we can claim that there is no shame in using web scraping for business purposes. There are technical web scraping best practices that will ease the traffic load on the scraped website, such as:
Using website’s APIs rather than web scraping, when available.
Integrating web scrapers with proxy servers.
Using headless browsers.
As long as you find a trusted web crawler to work with or make sure your technical resources take these into consideration, you can defend your web scraping being ethical for your business purposes.
Dos:
Scrape only the data you need by determining the exact business case and customizing your web crawler technology for it. This will minimize your risk of exhausting the scraped website with unwanted traffic.
Always read the terms of use of the scraped website. Apart from commercial terms of use, websites also have a robot.txt file which includes information about the permissions of the scraped website. Your web crawling solution or technical experts should help you with abiding by those permissions.
Be transparent about your web scraping and be ready to explain your scraping process to assure others that your approach is legal and ethical.
Don’ts:
Do not exhaust the scraped website with too often and extensive pulls. This will also increase the likelihood that your crawler will be blocked by the scraped website.
Do not collect personally identifiable information or if robot.txt allows you to collect it, make sure to mask the data to minimize exposure at processing.
Do not expose the scraped data to public. Make sure that it is stored securely just like your own company data. You never know for what purposes it may be used if leaked.