Ask HN: Is it legal to scrape shipment tracking information?
I've checked out TOS on a several postal service websites and not finding anything preventing this in TOS. Is this a generally legal?
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]
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- accuracy of data: this is not guaranteed for the web views, they may (and are) usually outdated by hours - volume of updates: carrier APIs usually come with rate limitations and can also require contracts for uses