
Ask HN: Is it legal to scrape shipment tracking information? - avenoir
I&#x27;ve checked out TOS on a several postal service websites and not finding anything preventing this in TOS. Is this a generally legal?
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cVwEq
Which region/country are you referring to? What's the use case?

IANAL, but I used to work at one of the large transportation providers. For
the high-volume tracking use cases, web site scraping probably won't cut it
(too slow, probably get blocked by the carrier). Most high-volume trackers
used the carriers' APIs. It was sort of a love-hate relationship and my
carrier would sometimes block high-volume carriers who ran refund services on
behalf of other customers.

In short, whether it's "legal" or not, if you are doing a high volume of
tracking for refunds you will be at the mercy of the carrier who could cut you
off at anytime. A firewall against that is to have a bunch of high-volume
paying customers of that carrier who would pitch a fit if your service was
turned off.

[Edited for clarification]

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marenkay
From experience with using carriers tracking information world-wide: scraping
will be fine for low volume usage and if we are talking personal use cases.

If this has any professional smell (as in you make money with whatever you use
the data for) you will want and need access to each carriers API for several
reasons:

\- accuracy of data: this is not guaranteed for the web views, they may (and
are) usually outdated by hours \- volume of updates: carrier APIs usually come
with rate limitations and can also require contracts for uses

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jeffmould
Why scrape when, at least in the US, all the major players (USPS, UPS, FedEx)
have free API that you can use to query tracking information?

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cVwEq
Two (weak) reasons I can think of: 1. If doing a low-volume of tracking
requests, it could be an easier implementation instead of learning the ins and
outs of an API. 2. No carrier approval required for web scraping, unlike the
APIs.

