internet social-media
Is it legal to scrape an individuals&#39; public data from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?
<p>I am building a website builder for small businesses. During the onboarding process the user provides his/her business social media accounts.</p>
<p>I am interested on extracting the public information in the business social media accounts (phone number, email, business location, etc.) to autocomplete the sign up form.</p>
<p>I have been looking at each social network terms of service and as expected all of them have a clause against automated data collection.</p>
<p>However most of the examples are aimed at crawling and scraping data in bulk. What I want to know is if it's legal to extract <strong>public</strong> data <strong>that belongs to the user itself</strong> and <strong>don't store it</strong> until the user submits the form.</p>
<p>--</p>
<p><strong>Instagram terms of use</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/before-january-19-2013/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/before-january-19-2013/</a></p>
<p>You must not crawl, scrape, or otherwise cache any content from Instagram including but not limited to user profiles and photos.</p>
<p><strong>Facebook terms of use</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php</a> (2010)</p>
<p>You will not engage in Automated Data Collection without Facebook's express written permission.</p>
<p><strong>Google Maps terms of use</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms</a></p>
<p>(a)  No Scraping. Customer will not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services. For example, Customer will not: (i) pre-fetch, index, store, reshare, or rehost Google Maps Content outside the services; (ii) bulk download Google Maps tiles, Street View images, geocodes, directions, distance matrix results, roads information, places information, elevation values, and time zone details; (iii) copy and save business names, addresses, or user reviews; or (iv) use Google Maps Content with text-to-speech services.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>&quot;...all of them have a clause against automated data collection.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's true.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>'...most of the examples are aimed at crawling and scraping data in
bulk.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How do you interrpret that?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...You must not crawl, scrape, or otherwise cache any content from
Instagram. ...You will not engage in Automated Data Collection without
Facebook's express written permission. ... No Scraping. Customer will
not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use
outside the Services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those phrases do not differentiate between bulk scraping and scraping of one individuals' data. They simply state &quot;any content&quot;, no &quot;Automated Data Collection&quot;, &quot;no scraping.&quot; &quot;Any&quot; and &quot;all&quot; means all.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I want to know is if it's legal to extract public data that
belongs to the user itself and don't store it until the user submits
the form.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You are scraping public data, and public data belonging to someone else. Further, you are scraping data for someone who can't give permission for you to scrape their data because that's against the TOS they agreed to when they signed up for the service.</p>

<h2>You cannot scrape through the HTML interface</h2>
<p>However, all of these sites have APIs using JSON with different terms of service to allow data collection. Read those ToS.</p>
