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Legal Disclaimer and Responsible Use

Focal Harvest is a local command-line utility designed for personal, academic, and professional research purposes. By using this tool, you accept responsibility for ensuring your usage complies with applicable laws, platform terms of service, and regional privacy regulations.

Contents​

Public Data Scraping​

Programmatic collection of publicly accessible data — content that does not require logging in — is legally protected under established U.S. case law. Relevant precedents include hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, Meta v. Bright Data, and X Corp. v. Bright Data, all of which affirm the legality of scraping public web content.

That said, many platforms explicitly prohibit automated scraping in their Terms of Service, even of public data. Platforms may implement technical blocks or take action against IP addresses running automated sweeps. Focal Harvest's built-in rate limiting, caching, and User-Agent rotation are designed to behave respectfully — they are not designed to circumvent legal restrictions.

Authenticated Scraping​

caution

Do not use active personal session cookies with Focal Harvest.

Scraping authenticated content using your personal account credentials breaches most platforms' Terms of Service and can result in the immediate suspension or permanent ban of your account. If you need to scrape content behind a login for research purposes, use a dedicated burner or research account created specifically for that purpose. Never use cookies from accounts tied to your personal identity or professional work.

Rate Limiting and Server Resources​

Aggressive automated scraping that degrades target server performance can constitute "trespass to chattels" under U.S. law and equivalent doctrines in other jurisdictions. Focal Harvest's default settings — retry backoff, request jitter, and local caching — are designed to keep crawl rates polite. Do not override these defaults to run high-volume parallel sweeps against any single target.

Specifically: do not disable caching, set backoff_factor to zero, and run large concurrent sweeps against the same domain in a tight loop. This is both legally risky and contrary to the tool's design philosophy.

Data Storage and Privacy​

All data collected by Focal Harvest is cached and stored locally on your filesystem in reports/. The maintainers do not collect, transmit, or hold any scraped content. You are solely responsible for ensuring that your data collection, storage, and use complies with applicable privacy regulations — including GDPR (European Union), CCPA (California), and DPDP (India) — particularly when your collection involves Personally Identifiable Information about real individuals.

If you are using Focal Harvest in a professional or organizational context, consult your legal team before collecting data that may be subject to data protection obligations.

License​

Focal Harvest is distributed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file in the GitHub repository for the full license text.

The MIT License grants you broad rights to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software. It does not grant any rights with respect to the data you collect using it — those rights are governed by the terms and laws described above.