Legal aspects of scraping are a set of questions that need to be assessed before automated data collection from the web. The public availability of data does not mean it can be used freely. At least four dimensions are assessed. The first is the website's terms of use, which may explicitly prohibit automated collection. The second is personal data protection, if the data being collected includes information about natural persons, including contacts – in that case a legal basis is needed, and usually also informing the data subjects. The third is copyright and database law, since the systematic extraction of a substantial part of another party's database is separately protected. The fourth is the method of collection, that is, circumventing technical measures or overloading the server. Assess your specific intention with a lawyer before launching it, not after.
See also: Rate limiting and ethical scraping, Data audit, Data enrichment.
