Is Web Scraping Legal? The Complete 2021 Guide

Some people make blanket statements, saying that web scraping is legal or illegal often based on their own incentives. Be it web scrapers themselves arguing how web scraping is perfectly legal or corporate lawyers and anti-bots companies arguing the opposite.

In truth, there isn’t an easy yes or no answer to this question.

It really depends on the particular situation. Web scraping itself isn’t illegal but can be illegal (or in a grey area) depending on these three things:

1. The type of data you are scraping
2. How you plan to use the scraped data
3. How you extracted the data from the website

Numbers 1 & 2 are more clear cut so we will start here before tackling number 3, the tricky one.