“Is scraping Nextdoor legal” cannot be answered as asked, and the honest version of the answer is more useful than a yes or a no. The obligations attach to the data, not to the technique — so the practical question is which fields you are collecting and what you are doing with them.
Why “is scraping legal” is the wrong question
Scraping is a technique, like taking notes. Nobody asks whether note-taking is legal, because the answer obviously depends on what is being noted and why. The same is true here, and framing the question at the level of the technique produces answers that are either uselessly broad (“public data is fine”) or uselessly cautious (“never scrape anything”).
The productive question is narrower: for this field, about this kind of subject, used this way, what applies?
Two categories of data in one response
A single Nextdoor request can return both of these, which is exactly why the distinction has to be made in the code rather than in a policy document:
| Data | Character |
|---|---|
| Business name, phone, email, website, address | Published by a business in order to be contacted. |
| Neighbor post, partial author name, neighborhood, incident description | Personal content about an identifiable resident. |
Treating those the same because both were technically visible on a public page is the mistake that most scraping projects make once and then regret.
Published business contact details
This is the least contentious category. A business that lists its phone number on a directory has published it for the purpose of being contacted, and collecting it is not meaningfully different from reading the directory.
Two qualifications. Collecting is not the same as using: rules on unsolicited commercial contact apply to how you reach out, wherever you and the recipient are. And a sole trader operating from a home address sits closer to an individual than a company — the hide_address flag is a reasonable signal for that population, and it exists because those businesses chose privacy.
Neighbor content, and why it is off by default
Neighbor posts carry a partial real name, free text and frequently a specific neighborhood. Sometimes they describe local safety incidents. A first name with a last initial is not identifying on its own; combined with a precise neighborhood in a town of a few thousand people, it often is.
Which is why the Actor puts two separate switches in the way. includeCityPosts is off by default, and includeAuthorNeighborhood is a second opt-in on top of it. Two deliberate actions, because the combination is what creates the risk rather than either field alone.
Author names are also never cross-referenced, enriched or resolved to real people. That is not a missing feature.
CCPA and “publicly available”
The California Consumer Privacy Act is the regime most likely to apply here, since this Actor covers the United States only. Its treatment of publicly available information is narrower than the phrase suggests: the exemption is not a blanket carve-out for anything visible on a website, and how you use the data affects the analysis.
If your subjects or users are California residents, that is a question for counsel with your specific use case in front of them — not one to settle from a scraper's documentation.
Terms of service and the login line
There is a real difference between reading pages as an anonymous visitor and logging in, thereby accepting terms, and then automating that account. It is one of the reasons this Actor never signs in.
That is a statement about which position the Actor takes, not a guarantee about any legal outcome. Terms, statutes and case law vary by jurisdiction and change; what does not change is that the two positions are different, and only one of them involves an agreement you personally entered into.
A practical checklist
- List the fields you are actually keeping, not the ones the tool can return.
- Split them into business data and personal data. If the second list is not empty, know why each item is on it.
- Write down the purpose before collecting, because almost every regime asks what it was.
- Set a retention period. Indefinite retention of personal data is the default only because nobody chose otherwise.
- Have a removal route. This project has one: data removal.
- Take advice if individuals are involved at scale. The reasoning on this site is a starting point for that conversation, not a substitute for it.
