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Discussion Paper: Screen Scraping – Policy and Regulatory Implications

The Law Council of Australia provided a submission to the Treasury in response to its Discussion Paper on the policy and regulatory implications of screen scraping.

The Law Council is grateful for the assistance of its Legal Practice Section’s Australian Consumer Law Committee (ACL Committee) and the Queensland Law Society in preparing this submission.

Current uses of screen scraping

Screen scraping (also known as digital data capture) usually involves the use of technology to inspect and analyse the data contained in the browser window, either by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or by converting a string of data into another format (data parsing) through the HTML output. This method is typically not authorised by, or necessarily within the control of, the hosting website. Whilst the website terms may seek to prohibit this practice, it can be difficult to control without extensive – and not fool-proof – back-end configuration, which is possible to circumvent.

The form of screen scraping that is the focus of the Discussion Paper involves consumers sharing their personal login details (i.e., for internet banking) with third parties. These third parties collect point-in-time data to provide the consumer with a service.1 Screen scraping is used in the banking and financial services industries, as well as by energy providers and non-bank lenders.2

Read the full submission below.

1 The Treasury, Screen scraping – policy and regulatory implications (Discussion Paper, August 2023) <https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-08/c2023-436961-dp.pdf> 4.
2 James Eyers, Treasury considers an end to bank account password sharing, The Australian Financial Review (Online, 31 August 2023) <https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/treasury-mulling-an-end-to-screen-scraping-in-favour-of-open-banking-20230830-p5e0rs>.

Last Updated on 26/11/2024

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