Web scraping is legal — but with limits. Here is what the law says.
Key Legal Precedent: HiQ v. LinkedIn
US court ruled scraping publicly available data does NOT violate the CFAA.
What You CAN Scrape
- Public business listings (Google Maps, Yelp)
- Public product data (prices, descriptions)
- Public social media posts (Bluesky, Reddit)
- Public government data
- Public job listings
- Public academic papers (arXiv)
What You Should NOT Scrape
- Private/logged-in content
- Personal data at scale (GDPR applies)
- Copyrighted content for redistribution
- Data behind paywalls
Best Practices
- Use official APIs first
- Respect robots.txt
- Add rate limiting (3-5s delays)
- Set proper User-Agent header
- Store only what you need
The API-First Approach
9 free APIs that need no scraping at all — completely legal, structured data.
Resources
Need data extracted legally? API-first approach for compliant scraping. $20. Email: Spinov001@gmail.com | Hire me
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