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@article{199952,
        author = {Purva Chavan and Prajakta Musale and Amitraj Chaudhari and Pratibha Chavan and Aditya Chiparikar and Kunal Dahatre},
        title = {Web Scraping Legality Checker},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {12},
        number = {12},
        pages = {2008-2018},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=199952},
        abstract = {Web scraping is now a crucial method of acquiring data in the fields of research, news, market research and automated processes. Nevertheless, the legal and ethical limits of the automated data extraction can be considered unclear because of the differences between the Terms of Service (ToS) of the websites, the robots.txt instructions, the anti-bot protection and local jurisdiction rules. In this paper, the Web Scraping Legality Checker, a Chrome extension that offers pre-scraping legality and risk evaluation with a multi-factor analysis framework, will be presented. The system is a combination of technical analysis, interpretation of laws, and document summary tools based on AI and generation of ethical codes to help developers decide whether a target site can be scraped in a responsible manner.
The suggested solution applies a seven-step pipeline consisting of API endpoint identification, robots.txt and DOM-based red-flag and honeypot finding, ToS scraping, and legal interpretation with the help of a large language model (LLM). It is a risk-scoring algorithm that calculates the composite score (between 0 and 100) which is used to label targets as low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk. The extension also includes a Playwright-based code generator which generates templates to scrape ethical data with compliance limits (refusing to generate code to high-risk websites). The tool is experimentally used on various websites, and it has been proven that it is capable of efficiently synthesizing legal, technical, and security indicators into a sensible, practical evaluation.
The contribution of this work is a new developer-focused responsible scraping of the web through the legal, technical, and AI-based analysis in an easy-to-use browser-based format. The system fosters moral automation, minimizes the chances of ToS breaches, and enables future investigations of the jurisdiction-sensitive risk modeling and automated compliance systems.},
        keywords = {Web Scraping, Legal Compliance, Robots.txt, Terms of Service Analysis, Browser Extension, Ethical Automation, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-Assisted Legal Interpretation, Anti-Bot Detection, Honeypot Detection, Risk Scoring Algorithm, Playwright Automation, Web Security, Data Extraction Ethics.},
        month = {May},
        }