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Is Web Scraping Legal in Australia?

Web scraping is legal in Australia, but it may be subject to certain restrictions and limitations. Generally, it follows the usual web scraping laws and regulations that apply to most countries: scraping of public or personal data is legal, but scraping of private or copyrighted data can be illegal.

In Australia, web scraping is generally considered a legal activity as long as it is done for legitimate purposes and does not violate any laws or cause damages to the target website.

Generally, Australian web scraping laws are similar to those of EU and US focusing on fair use, copyright, data privacy and business damages:

Protects the rights of copyright holders, and it is a violation of copyright law to reproduce or communicate a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder. This means that if a website owner has not given permission to scrape their website, this act might be violated.

The Privacy Act

Regulates the collection, use, and storage of personal data, and web scraping that involves the collection of personal data would have to comply with this law, which includes obtaining consent from individuals whose data is being collected and ensuring that the data is being used for a lawful purpose.

Just like EU's GDPR and US' CCPA this doesn't mean personal data can't be scraped, but can impose certain restrictions on how it can be used or stored.

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