Personal data is any information relating to an identifiable natural person. A name, a handle, a profile photo, a follower count attached to an account — all of it qualifies if a person can be identified from it.
The part that surprises people: public and personal are not opposites. A post visible to the whole internet is still personal data about whoever wrote it.
Public does not mean unregulated
Under the GDPR (EU) and the LGPD (Brazil), the legal question is not whether information was easy to obtain. It is whether you have a lawful basis for processing it, and whether you meet the obligations that follow.
The moment you store what you collected, you become a controller of that data, with duties attached:
| You now owe | In practice |
|---|---|
| A lawful basis | Usually legitimate interest, which must be assessed and documented |
| Transparency | People are entitled to know you hold data about them |
| Deletion | A valid erasure request has to be honoured |
| Proportionality | Collecting more than you need is itself a problem |
None of that is triggered by reading a public page. It is triggered by keeping what you read.
Terms of service are a separate question
Scraping a platform usually breaches its terms of service. That is a contractual matter — civil exposure, not criminal. Meta v. Bright Data (2024) held that scraping public data while logged off is not bound by terms you never accepted by logging in.
Data protection law is independent of that. Winning the terms-of-service argument does not make the GDPR question go away, and the two get conflated constantly — including by vendors who cite the first to imply the second.
What this means for a buyer
If you buy social data from any provider, you become the controller of what you store. The provider's legal position does not transfer to you. Worth asking them: what do they retain, for how long, and can they delete on request?
Our own answers are on the removal page and the privacy page, and the reasoning behind which sources we will not collect at all — several for licence reasons rather than technical ones — is written source by source under sources.
This is not legal advice. It is the shape of the question, so you can take the right one to someone who is a lawyer.