The ethics and legality of web scraping
The legality of web scraping has changed over the years. For example, a company called "Bidder's Edge" was scraping eBay in the late 1990s for their auction data. eBay took them to court and Bidder's Edge agreed to pay eBay a settlement in cash and stop scraping their data. However, in more recent times (2019), the company hiQ won a court ruling against LinkedIn, allowing hiQ to scrape LinkedIn's public-facing data. The legal precedent at this point seems to be that if the data is public-facing, it can be scraped. This means if we can access the data without logging in to an account (and without clicking any buttons agreeing to terms of service), then we are probably legally allowed to scrape the data. However, big companies have lots of resources and lawyers, so scraping their data and using it to create a business runs the risk of litigation, like in the case of hiQ.
Craigslist is an example of a site that is...