Law note · Florida
Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA)
What it asks of an app
- A scraping or data-reselling practice that misrepresents your identity, origin, or authenticity to consumers or to a scraped site's operator can expose you to a private FDUTPA claim, though no Florida case has tested this against a scraping fact pattern.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
What we found
FDUTPA prohibits unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in trade or commerce, enforceable by the Florida Attorney General and by private right of action for actual damages plus attorney's fees.
In the absence of a Florida bot-disclosure or scraping-specific statute, FDUTPA is the plausible vehicle for a claim against a scraper or a scraped-data reseller whose conduct is deceptive as to origin or authenticity, though no FDUTPA decision addressing scraping specifically was located.
FDUTPA's short title and core prohibition were both enacted by ch. 73-124, Laws of Florida (1973), confirmed against flsenate.gov's own History note to section 501.201; that note, like the Florida Senate's statute pages generally for chapters this old, does not carry the day of the year, and no session-law or secondary source located this pass supplied it, so the commencement date is left unset rather than assumed from either Florida's constitutional 60-day-after-adjournment default or a period-typical October 1 date.