Is It Legal to Scrape TikTok?

TikTok has two sets of terms for this market, and both forbid automated collection.

• United States. The US Terms of Service, last updated July 15, 2026, are an agreement with TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, "the operator of the Platform in the United States". Users may not "scrape, crawl, export or otherwise extract any data or content in any form, for any purpose, from the Platform using any automated system or software, including automated 'bots,' except as approved in writing by TikTok USDS Joint Venture".
• EEA, UK and Switzerland. The EEA, UK and Switzerland Terms of Service, last updated July 2026, forbid users to "extract any data or content from the Platform using any automated system or software that is not provided by TikTok or approved in writing by TikTok".

robots.txt. On October 23, 2026, tiktok.com/robots.txt allowed general crawlers on pages such as /foryou, /discover, /tag and /music, disallowed search pages and TikTok Shop product pages (/shop/view/product/), and blocked AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot, from the whole site. robots.txt is not law (RFC 9309), but it records what TikTok asks of crawlers, and Europe's regulators read it as a sign that a site opposes scraping.

Sources TikTok US Terms of Service; TikTok EEA, UK and Switzerland Terms of Service; tiktok.com/robots.txt; RFC 9309.

Not as a crime, for public pages collected while logged out. In the US, the federal anti-hacking law turns on entering areas that are off limits to you (Van Buren v. United States, 2021), and the Ninth Circuit held in hiQ v. LinkedIn (2022) that scraping public profiles was likely not access "without authorization". The civil risks remain:

• Contract. If you have a TikTok account and scrape while logged in, you agreed to the terms above. In 2024, a federal court held that Meta's terms did not reach scraping while logged out (order, N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-00077); scraping logged in is the opposite case.
• Copyright. Videos, music and captions are creators' and rights holders' works. Counting views is not copying; downloading and reposting videos is.
• Personal data. Usernames, profiles, follower lists and comments identify people. In Europe the GDPR applies whether or not the profile is public, and TikTok's audience includes minors, whose data regulators treat with extra care.

Sources Van Buren; hiQ v. LinkedIn; GDPR.

TikTok Shop listings sit on the same platform, so the same terms apply, and robots.txt asks crawlers to stay off product pages. Product prices, ratings and stock are facts, so the copyright risk is low; the risks are contract, the EU database right if you copy a substantial part of the shop catalog (Directive 96/9/EC), and personal data if you collect seller or reviewer identities. Tracking the prices of products you compete with is a different act from mirroring the whole catalog. More marketplaces: eBay, Walmart, Zillow and other marketplaces.

TikTok Research Tools. TikTok's Research API page says qualified researchers in the US, Europe, Canada and Brazil can apply to study public data on accounts and content, including EU-based TikTok Shops. Eligible applicants are academic institutions in the US, EEA, UK, Canada or Switzerland, or not-for-profit research bodies in the EU; they must be independent of commercial interests and disclose their funding. Commercial users are not eligible.

EU Digital Services Act. Article 40 of the Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 gives vetted researchers access to data from very large online platforms, and Article 40(12) requires those platforms to give researchers who meet its conditions access to publicly accessible data. TikTok's developer page points researchers to that route through national Digital Services Coordinators.

If you monitor TikTok for a brand or a shop, these choices keep the risk down:

1. Stay logged out and collect public pages only.
2. Collect counts and trends, not people: views, likes, hashtags and prices rather than follower lists.
3. Do not download or repost videos without the creator's permission.
4. Keep the request rate low, and use a TikTok scraper API or a licensed data source where one exists.
5. Keep account work separate. Managing your own TikTok accounts through proxies is a different use with its own rules; see TikTok proxies.

ProxyField's acceptable use policy allows collecting public web data and social media monitoring, and forbids fake accounts, fake engagement and access to data behind logins you are not entitled to.

TikTok's terms and ProxyField's policy: public pages only, and follow the site's terms

• TikTok US Terms of Service (last updated July 15, 2026)
• TikTok EEA, UK and Switzerland Terms of Service (last updated July 2026)
• tiktok.com/robots.txt
• TikTok for Developers, Research Tools
• Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065
• RFC 9309, Robots Exclusion Protocol
• Van Buren v. United States (2021)
• hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, 9th Cir. (2022)
• N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-00077, order of January 23, 2024
• GDPR, Regulation (EU) 2016/679
• Database Directive 96/9/EC

This is not legal advice. Laws, court decisions and TikTok's terms change, and the primary sources linked on this page are the authority.