Law note · Indiana
House Enrolled Act 1360 (2026), data scraping definition and public-records anti-bot portal authorization
What it asks of an app
- If you send automated requests to an Indiana government public-records portal, expect the agency may require you to pass a CAPTCHA or equivalent human-verification mechanism before it processes your request.
- An Indiana agency may prioritize in-state, civic, journalistic, academic, or personal-use requesters over an out-of-state or automated requester, and may delay or surcharge a request it identifies as automated.
- An Indiana agency may report your automated requesting activity to the state Public Access Counselor if it suspects phishing or data scraping.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
What we found
House Enrolled Act 1360 adds new IC 5-14-3-2(d), defining data scraping to mean use of an automated system to extract data from websites and other Internet accessible sources, Indiana's first statutory definition of the term. New IC 5-14-3-3.3 authorizes, but does not require, a public agency to build a records-request portal using a CAPTCHA or an equivalent mechanism for ensuring that a requestor is a human, and to verify a requestor's address and Indiana residency.
New IC 5-14-3-8.1 lets an agency give priority to Indiana residents and to civic, journalistic, academic, or personal-use requests, while delaying or surcharging requests identified as originating from out-of-state entities or automated systems. New IC 5-14-3-11 requires an agency to report suspected automated, phishing, or data-scraping requests to the state Public Access Counselor through a standardized mechanism.
This bill had been carried in the corpus as dead from a prior research pass; reading the enrolled act's own text confirms it passed the General Assembly with a July 1, 2026 effective date on every section and no indication of a veto.