Is Web Scraping Legal in 2026? A Country-by-Country Guide

By Marcus Reiner · 2026-01-28 · 8 min read · Legal

#legal#compliance#gdpr

Scraping public data is generally legal. Bypassing logins, breaching contracts, or pulling personal data is not. Here's the nuance.

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United States — hiQ v. LinkedIn

Following the 2022 Ninth Circuit ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, scraping publicly available data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA only kicks in when you bypass a technical access barrier (login, CAPTCHA explicitly designed to gate access).

European Union — GDPR

GDPR applies whenever you process personal data of EU data subjects, regardless of where you scrape from. Scraping public business data is generally fine; scraping personal data requires a lawful basis and triggers your obligations as a data controller.

Best practices

Respect robots.txt where it expresses preferences. Don't scrape behind a login. Don't pull personal data without a lawful basis. Use ethical, KYC-compliant proxy vendors. Maintain reasonable rate limits.

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