Law note · Texas
Texas Breach of Computer Security, effective-consent and posted-prohibition offenses
What it asks of an app
- Accessing a Texas-connected computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner is a criminal offense regardless of your intent (Tex. Penal Code § 33.02(a)).
- A more serious offense applies when you access a government- or business-owned system in violation of a clear and conspicuous posted prohibition, or a contract you expressly agreed to, combined with intent to defraud or harm someone or to alter, damage, or delete their data; a posted no-scraping notice or a clickwrap agreement carries real legal weight once paired with that intent.
- Ordinary commercial data collection without fraudulent or harmful intent is not elevated to the more serious offense by a posted prohibition alone.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
What we found
Subsection (a) makes it a Class B misdemeanor to knowingly access a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.
A separate, more serious offense, subsection (b-1), is Texas's own statutory answer to the ToS and robots.txt authorization question: it applies where a person, with intent to defraud or harm another or to alter, damage, or delete property, knowingly accesses a computer system owned by government or a business in violation of either a clear and conspicuous prohibition posted by the owner or a contractual agreement the person expressly agreed to.
A posted no-scraping notice or a clickwrap agreement therefore carries independent legal weight in Texas, but only elevates exposure when paired with fraudulent or harmful intent, not for ordinary commercial data collection alone. Verified against the official Texas statutes site after the ordinary fetch tier returned a JavaScript shell and a stealth browser render was needed.
No Texas case law applying subsection (b-1) or CUBI's publicly available media clause to a scraping fact pattern was found.