Legal and Ethical Issues of Collecting and Using Online Hospitality Data

In “Web Scraping for Hospitality Research: Overview, Opportunities, and Implications,” Han and Anderson present the tools and methods for collecting online data through data scraping. Although the article describes in detail the processes for gathering data, and presented recent court rulings that allow data scraping in the United States, it did not adequately address the ethical collection of online data. The internet has opened up new opportunities to research interesting questions and to collect data much faster than has been possible in the past. The emergence of online databases and social media sites enables new lines of research while at the same time introducing new ethical questions for both researchers and institutional research boards (IRBs). Using web-based data for research is not new. However, as Han and Anderson point out, a 2019 ruling (HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corporation, appeal from the United States District Court) has redefined what is legal in online data collection. In the following, we highlight some of the key legal and ethical issues around the use of scraped data for academic research with the intent of ensuring researchers, reviewers, and editors are cognizant of some of these (evolving) issues.