I mostly scrape public interest government data, not commercial data. Personally, I don't really care about laws. I'm not hitting PACER or JSTOR, I'm not starti

I mostly scrape public interest government data, not commercial data. Personally, I don't really care about laws. I'm not hitting PACER or JSTOR, I'm not starting a competing company, and I'm not making my scrapers available as a service, so I'm totally unlikely to be sued. In terms of ethics I typically apply a sort of "try to be considerate" test. If I am doing personal, non-commercial scraping, only scraping public data, not releasing the data, using timer delays, respecting 429 codes, and not doing too much to mask my identity, and the servers I'm hitting are massive services handling multi-million user concurrency and I'm using a DigitalOcean droplet, then I'm not really a problem. And I trust their well paid sysadmins to block me or contact me if I am the problem. I do check robots.txt in advance. If there is one, it doesn't stop me, but it generally means I take extra precautions to avoid causing trouble for the service in question. On the other hand, I once scraped the DPRK's English language press office as part of some research, and about two weeks later it became inaccessible from any country other than Japan, so I'm pretty sure I almost caused a diplomatic incident. Oops. In this case, it's 40 lines of python code using a single threaded requests request, only scraping a single page, not doing any funny business with user agent spoofing, etc. I think you're right, it's probably not something Instagram wants to happen and theoretically I'm sure they could send a takedown, but I guess I have a pretty laissez-faire attitude about this: is it really a good use of their time to stop this guy?