terms-of-service
Building a site like socialbade illegal?
<p>There are plenty of sites that seem to grab/crawl public profiles form Instagram, e.g. Socialblade, Instastatistics, or Likeometer.</p>

<p>What I read from Instagram’s TOC is that this is violating these TOCs, esp. </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>You must not access Instagram's private API by any other means other
  than the Instagram application itself. You must not crawl, scrape, or
  otherwise cache any content from Instagram including but not limited
  to user profiles and photos.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>So, are all these sites operating illegally?</p>

<p>Each service of those services may have a legal agreement in place with Instagram and can crawl and scrape legally. Read the TOS for each of those services; they may state that they have a licensing agreement with Instagram, but any such agreements may also be confidential.</p>

<p>On the other hand, those sites <em>might</em> be operating illegally, and Instagram 1) may have chosen not to pursue legal action because those services are in jurisdictions where legal action is difficult or expensive; or, 2) Instagram may feel like they benefit from the illegal scraping that nonetheless results in more traffic for them, so they ignore the illegality while still stating in their TOS that scraping is illegal.</p>
