Table of Contents
Introduction
Public web data can support legitimate business research, sales planning, monitoring, and analysis. It still needs careful scoping. A responsible project should define public sources, acceptable fields, intended use, storage needs, and review steps before extraction begins.
This checklist is not legal advice. It is a practical project planning guide for teams preparing a public data request.
Confirm the Source Is Public
The first question is whether the information is publicly accessible without logging in, bypassing restrictions, or accessing private systems. Public source examples should be provided during scoping.
Avoid restricted access
Do not include pages that require a user account, private membership, payment wall, internal access, or permission that your data partner does not have.
Document source URLs
Keep source URLs in the dataset when possible. Source references help with review, QA, and later questions about where a field came from.
Practical Business Examples
- A market research team collects public company descriptions, category pages, and source URLs for competitive analysis.
- A legal research team requests only public, unrestricted web records and avoids private case materials.
- A healthcare research project avoids personal health data and focuses only on public organization-level information.
These examples can connect to custom web scraping services, business data collection services, legal research, healthcare research, and market research data collection.
Checklist for a Safer Request
- Use public sources only.
- Exclude private, login-protected, restricted, or sensitive data.
- Provide source URLs or examples.
- Define the intended business use.
- Limit fields to what is necessary.
- Avoid collecting personal or sensitive attributes unless a careful review confirms they are appropriate.
- Include source URLs, timestamps, and notes where useful.
- Review the project before acceptance.
- Keep retention and deletion expectations clear.
Compliance Note
Scraping Geek reviews every project before acceptance. Requests involving private, login-protected, restricted, sensitive, or unclear data sources are not accepted. Public data projects may still be limited if the source terms, collection method, requested fields, or intended use require a narrower scope.