Is web scraping legal?
Scraping public data is generally lawful in the US: the Ninth Circuit's hiQ v. LinkedIn ruling held that collecting publicly accessible pages does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It is not a blanket permission, though, because platform Terms of Service and data-protection laws like GDPR still apply to what you collect and how you use it.
This is general information, not legal advice. The safest posture is to collect only public data, respect each platform's terms, and establish a lawful basis under GDPR Article 6 before processing any personal data of EU residents.
For the full jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction breakdown, read the legal and technical guide rather than relying on this summary.
Do it with SocialCrawl
A call that reads only public, non-authenticated data
curl "https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/search/everywhere?query=YourBrand" \
-H "x-api-key: sc_your_api_key_here"Have a question? We got answers
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