The General Secretariat of the Belgian data protection authority has published an informational booklet outlining the relationship between the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Regulation, which came into force on 1 August 2024. The authority’s aim with the informational booklet is to provide insights into the application of data protection requirements during the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems. Data protection requirements and legal standards are key to ensure that artificial intelligence systems operate ethically, responsibly and lawfully.

High-quality, diverse, and extensive datasets are fundamental for improving machine learning model performance, and web scraping helps gather the necessary data to develop more robust and generalizable models. Web scraping pose different legal challenges, such as data protection, copyright and contractual law related issues. Intellectual property concerns arise as website content, like text, images, and data, is often copyrighted, and scraping without the copyright owner’s permission may lead to infringement claims. Further to this, many websites prohibit scraping in their terms of service, and violating these terms can also result in legal action against the operators of web scrapers.

Contributed by Provaris.

Contributed by Provaris.