Is It Legal to Collect Web Data? What Should Not Be Done with Web Scraping
Yes, it is legal to collect publicly available data.The neutrality of a crawler is determined by a computer technology, so the crawler itself is not legally prohibited, it all depends on how you use it and what data you are collecting. In some special scenarios, the use of crawler technology to obtain data is illegal such as collecting user privacy information or use crawlers to do DDOS attacks..
The so-called specific analysis of specific problems is just like the fruit knife itself is not prohibited by law, but it is illegal to use it to stab or threaten people.
As we said, can we copy the information displayed on the browser? In fact, it parses and displays the page content just like a browser. The crawler only downloads it in batches, so it is legal. But the thing we need to keep in mind is how fast we are downloading the information. If you are sending tens of thousands of download requests every second, you might take the website down and you will get trouble. At barkingdata, we have strict control with our crawling speed. For a given website, we have no cralwers running more than 20 requests per second. Read more about our data collection protocols Here.
