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Is web scraping legal in 2026?
Scraping publicly accessible data is generally legal in most jurisdictions, and courts have repeatedly held that accessing public pages is not by itself unlawful. The limits come from three places: a site's terms of service, personal-data laws like GDPR and CCPA, and copyright. Staying on the safe side means scraping public, non-personal data, honoring robots.txt and rate limits, and not republishing copyrighted content.
What's generally allowed
Collecting public, factual data — prices, listings, headlines, availability — for your own analysis is broadly accepted. Being polite matters: identify yourself, respect robots.txt, and keep request rates reasonable so you don't burden the site.
Where the risk is
Personal data (names, emails, profiles) is regulated by GDPR, CCPA, and similar laws and needs a legal basis. Content behind a login or paywall involves the site's terms and possibly computer-access laws. Republishing scraped copyrighted text or images can infringe copyright even if collecting it didn't.
Page Byte enforces a polite-by-default posture: it honors robots.txt, defaults to one request per second per host, and rotates proxies on paid plans to reduce load and risk.