Is web scraping legal in 2026? The honest answer.
We are not your lawyers. But here is what we have learned after two years of shipping scraping tools, reading case law, and talking to compliance teams.
The short answer
Scraping publicly accessible data is generally legal in the US (hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, 2022) and in the EU under the TDM exception for "generally accessible" content. Scraping data behind authentication, bypassing technical protections, or reusing copyrighted material without permission is much riskier.
This is not legal advice. Talk to a lawyer if you are building a production workflow that depends on scraped data.
The nuances that matter
Terms of Service matter less than people think in the US — violating a ToS is typically a breach of contract, not a crime. In the EU, the analysis is more complex and depends on the site in question and the data extracted.
GDPR matters a lot if you scrape personal data in the EU. Legitimate interest can cover B2B enrichment in narrow cases, but consent is the safer ground.
How Stekpad helps you stay on the right side
Stekpad runs in your own browser. It does not upload your cookies to a server. It does not use residential proxies to disguise traffic. It does not help you bypass authentication you do not already have.
The technical architecture is designed so that every action Stekpad takes is something you could have done manually in the same browser. That alignment matters when compliance teams ask questions.
Related on Stekpad
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A catalogue of community-maintained and Stekpad-official scraping recipes. Each recipe includes: target site, fields extracted, expected schema, notes on auth requirements, and a "load this recipe" button. Organized by use-case category (leads, pricing, research, monitoring). Helps first-time users skip schema design entirely.
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