On March 8, 2024, Cybersecurity Law Report quoted David Patariu on a joint statement issued by numerous regulators around the globe calling for social media companies to take steps to prevent the scraping of personal data. According to the article, the statement references both technical and policy-focused steps that companies can enact to protect user information.
“Since issuing the Statement, the regulators and SMCs have productively discussed the practicalities needed to genuinely fulfill the stated expectations,” said Patariu. “This group really does want to understand the technology and get it right, and help companies figure this out.”
Some experts call out that the statement focuses on social media platforms being scraped, rather than the parties doing the scraping. “By targeting the SMCs, the Statement signatories risk penalizing the wrong parties to fix this problem,” Patariu explained. “The bad scrapers are where the focus should be, on people using scraped data to take advantage of end users or for more sophisticated phishing attacks. For companies trying to get it right and struggling with myriad privacy laws, scraping is just another difficult challenge that they face.”
He cautioned: “The consequence of regulators cracking down on websites’ insufficient anti-scraping efforts would be that more information and popular features “end up in walled gardens or behind paywalls, and undermine the rich internet environment that businesses and consumers have relied on for decades.”
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