Is my business idea even legal? (question about web scraping)
Hello fellow indie hackers!
I have an idea for an app where a user can receive email notifications if a product they want shows up on facebook marketplace, craigslist etc.
For example, if a person likes to collect retro video games they could have several keywords that my webscraper would search for and notify them if an item for sale becomes available. This way they could be one of the first people to notify the seller if they are interested.
I have researched the legality of this but everything I find seems to be a "grey area". I would hate to spend a lot of time creating this to only be shut down my facebook.
Does anyone have any experience doing something similar? Is there a for sure legal and safe way of doing this without being shut down?
thanks in advance!
What country are you in? The most recent ruling in this regard in the US (if I'm not mistaken) is hiQ v. LinkedIn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn), which ruled that scraping by hiQ was legal, and that LinkedIn is not allowed to block them.
That being said, as @Dargon suggested, best to run it by a lawyer.
I'm in the US. I read through the article and it was pretty interesting. Honestly, they may have bigger fish to fry than me if I were to build something like this.
That depends on the policy of the targeted business. In general, scraping is considered a "grey area", but it is in no means illegal. BUT: A business can deny any automated fetching of their data in their usage policy.
I've personally encountered this in a couple of businesses in Finland;
The other is a marketplace where users can put their items on sale, the other is an online auction. Both have listed automated scraping and the using of bots for buying as not-allowed in their usage policy.
EDIT: You know these sites where you can follow the price trends of products e.g. in Amazon, eBay or other marketplaces? Yes, a lot of them are scraping and all of them are legit businesses.
Not to mention Google Search, a billion dollar business that is founded on web scraping. So it is legitimate. But having a team of lawyers would help.
That's a good point. It really is a grey area. I think I might pass on this idea because it is not a solid foundation. There is a lot of work that could go into just to be taken down my a cease and desist letter.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.