Does the Privacy Act apply to my startup's web scraping?

Web scraping personal information must comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) unless an exemption applies. While a small business exemption currently exists for entities with a turnover under $3 million, startups that ’trade in personal information’ lose this exemption entirely. Furthermore, scraping copyrighted data to train AI models without a licence may constitute infringement under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), as Australia lacks a broad fair use exception for text and data mining.

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Read our Complete Startup Legal Guide for Queensland