Dragnet Data Protection: Dilemmas of Web Scraping and Public Interest Research CPDP 2026

Dragnet Data Protection: Dilemmas of Web Scraping and Public Interest Research Indiscriminate scraping of data from digital environments — a new form of ‘dragnet’ data collection — has fuelled both the latest generation of AI research and practice as well as leading to widespread public controversy around extraction from the public sphere and surveillance of online communities. Universities are more important than ever when research methods are societally controversial, as they can remain able to discover and innovate by establishing and maintaining a social license. They do this through their focus on the public interest, their key educational and outreach roles, and the care and leadership in meeting regulatory and ethical obligations. Yet universities are struggling on multiple fronts to work out what their own collection and use of this data should look like. At the same time, large firms, especially content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Cloudflare and Akamai are operating bot blockers which both protect sites against unwanted commercial scraping, but hinder bone fide researchers' ability to understand, appraise, and archive the digital world. In this panel, we bring together practitioners, computational researchers and legal scholars to discuss the ways forward for ethics and legality in web scraping. Questions to be answered: How does data protection understand and apply to web scraping, and what tensions does interpreting it present? What issues are researchers facing with studying the Web due to the rise of anti-bot measures, and should bone fide research institutions be technically facilitated to scrape? Should researchers use datasets collected for AI training? Should they publish datasets, knowing they might be used this way? What safeguards in research involving scraped data should be in place, both during scraping and when the data has been gathered? What role for data rights? Organised by University College London with Michael Veale (moderator), Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Alexandra Potts, Thomas Vandamme, Luc Rocher More information: https://cpdp.be/129178