Is It Legal to Collect Public Emails from Instagram?
5 min read
People often ask whether collecting an email that an Instagram business has made public is allowed. The honest answer is that it depends. There are two separate questions, and they have different answers.
Question 1: Is the information public?
A contact email a business shows on its own public profile is information the owner chose to publish so customers can reach them. Information from private accounts is not public, and you should not try to get it. Scrapevia only uses what an account owner has made public.
Question 2: Are you allowed to email them?
Collecting a public address is not the same as having the right to send marketing to it. The rules that matter are the email laws that apply to the person you write to:
- In the United States, CAN-SPAM covers commercial email. It requires honest sender details and subject lines, a postal address, and a working opt-out that you honour quickly.
- In the EU and UK, privacy laws such as GDPR and the PECR rules apply. They are stricter for emails to individuals, and often more relaxed for emails to a company address about the company's business. You need a lawful basis and you must be clear about who you are.
- Other countries have their own rules. Canada, for example, has strict anti-spam law.
Habits that keep you on the safe side
- Write to businesses about something relevant to their business.
- Say who you are and how you found them.
- Use a real sender name and address, and include an easy way to opt out.
- Stop emailing anyone who asks, and keep a list of opt-outs.
- Do not buy or scrape private data, and do not send to personal addresses without a good reason.
- Keep your list clean, so you do not email dead or wrong addresses.
If you collect personal data about people in the EU or UK, also look at your duties about storing it, how long you keep it, and answering requests to remove it.
Collect the accounts a profile follows, filter them, and get the public emails. New accounts get 100 free credits.
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