web scraping is legal or not?

Question

I want to scrape a website that has all their store's contact details on their web pages, which I can manually note down, so scraping that website is legal or illegal.

Answer 1

Yes, unless you use it unethically. Web scraping is just like any tool in the world. You can use it for the good stuff and you can use it for bad stuff. Web scraping itself is not illegal. As a matter of fact, web scraping – or web crawling, were historically associated with well-known search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines crawl sites and index the web. Because these search engines built trust and brought back traffic and visibility to the sites they crawled, their bots created a favorable view towards web scraping. It is all about how you to web scrape and what you do with the data you acquire.

A great example of when web scraping can be illegal is when you try to scrape nonpublic data. Nonpublic data can be something that is not reachable for everyone on the web. Maybe you have to log in to see the data. In this case, web scraping is probably unethical, depending on the context. Also, it does matter how nice you are technically when scraping a website. To learn more, I urge you to check out the most frequent legal issues associated with web scraping!

Answer 2

I am not a lawyer so this is just my personal opinion:

But first, check the website's TOS (Terms of Service) - It should say somewhere in there about their policies about web scraping, use of data, or using an automated way to obtain their data/information.

In my opinion, if you are not doing anything malicious, (Ie. using it to exploit a person/company, posting the data on a separate website, plagiarising, using it to profit off of, attacking the the server in an unethical way like making 1000s of requests per second, crawling the site to obtain ALL the information they hold, etc.) and just using it for personal use, then you will probably be ok. No company (I would think), would want to spend the money and resources in the legal system to punish "John Doe" from scraping their site a few times for personal use.

Now if you are doing unethical and malicious things with the data, and/or it also contains people's personal data/information, then that is most likely illegal and could get you in trouble.

Bottom line, if in doubt, try to contact the site and ask if you are really unsure and need peace of mind. Tell them what you are after, and what you are trying to do (Ie: I am a student doing a project and I'm trying to acquire x data to do y with it.) I have found to have success doing that, where they'd reply, "Sure. But please do it in a way that doesn't overload our systems. Like put in a a few seconds delay after each request". Or, "No, you can't do that, however you can acquire the full dataset as part of our "researchers package" for $50".

In your case, if you are just trying to obtain store contact info, you are most likely fine, as like you said, it's all there anyway and you could manually copy/paste it, but just trying to automate that tedious process.