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GDPR: guides & tutorials

GDPR affects personal data scraped from EU pages—lawful basis, retention, erasure. Minimize fields and document purpose before storing extracted profiles.

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GDPR shapes how you handle personal data scraped from EU pages: lawful basis, retention limits, and the right to erasure. These guides cover staying compliant when extracted records include personal information.

The safe pattern is to minimize fields, document purpose, and avoid storing personal data you do not need. Below you will find practical GDPR guidance for scraping programs that touch EU data.

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Guides on this site

Frequently asked questions

Frequently Asked Questions

GDPR applies whenever you collect personal data (names, emails, IP addresses, photos) of EU residents, regardless of where your servers are. You need a lawful basis: consent, contract, legal obligation, legitimate interest, or vital interest. Legitimate interest is most cited for B2B scraping but requires a documented balancing test.

Minimize data collection to what you need, document your lawful basis per data type, implement retention and deletion schedules, honor subject access and erasure requests, and record processing in your RoPA. If scraping special category data (health, politics, biometrics), explicit consent is almost always required.

The legitimate interest test requires that your interest outweighs the individual's privacy interests, that you need the data for that purpose, and that individuals would reasonably expect it. DPAs have issued guidance that bulk scraping of personal profiles rarely passes this test. Consult legal counsel before any EU personal data scraping project.

Encrypt data in transit and at rest, log access to personal data with timestamps, implement automatic deletion workflows, use pseudonymization where possible, and keep processing records. Apify audit logs and run metadata support compliance documentation. Consider data residency options if your DPA requires EU-only processing.