Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brought by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal information from users’ public profiles.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the internet.
But there have been egregious cases of web scraping that have sparked privacy and security concerns. Facial recognition startup Clearview AI claims to have scraped billions of social media profile photos, prompting several tech giants to file lawsuits against the startup. Several companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Venmo and Clubhouse have all had users’ data scraped over the years.
Source: Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms | TechCrunch
