Scraping Battles: Global Privacy Regulators Urge Safeguards to Stop Data Scraping

A dozen national regulators around the globe recently issued a joint statement effectively obligating social media companies to take steps to prevent scraping of personal data. The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office told the Cybersecurity Law Report that five large companies named in the statement have submitted comments sought by the regulators, and regulators plan to summarize the initiative and those comments publicly in April. This second article of a two-part series on the latest scraping developments discusses the key takeaways from the regulators’ statement and offers practical suggestions for companies on both sides of data scraping to address its risks. Part one explained the implications of a January decision favoring scraper Bright Data over Meta and the state of scraping case law. On February 23, Meta agreed to drop the rest of its case and not appeal. See “E.U. Regulators Bar Meta From Requiring Users to Pay With Their Data” (Jan. 25, 2023).

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