South Africa

South Africa's comprehensive private-sector data-protection regime is the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA), whose lawful-processing conditions and enforcement machinery commenced on 1 July 2020 with a one-year transitional period, so full compliance and Information Regulator enforcement began on 1 July 2021.

POPIA binds both public and private responsible parties, carries no general carve-out for publicly available personal information, treats biometric information (including voice recognition) as special personal information subject to heightened restrictions, restricts automated decision-making that has legal or substantially similar effect, and conditions any cross-border transfer on an enumerated adequacy, consent, or contractual ground.

A data subject may bring a civil damages action directly against a responsible party for a breach of the Act, and the Information Regulator may issue administrative fines of up to R10 million or refer conduct for criminal prosecution carrying up to ten years' imprisonment.

South Africa has no scraping-specific statute, so general law governs each dimension separately.

The Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 criminalises unlawfully and intentionally accessing a computer system or data storage medium, and unlawfully and intentionally intercepting data, but neither offence turns on defeating a technical access control, so reading a public, unauthenticated page falls outside a plain reading of section 2 only to the extent the access is not itself unlawful; no reported South African case has tested a scraper's liability under either section.

That Act's Schedule repealed sections 85 to 88 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, which previously carried South Africa's unauthorised-access offence, so the earlier ECTA computer-misuse regime no longer applies and the Cybercrimes Act is the current law. No South African court has ruled on the enforceability of a browsewrap or clickwrap terms-of-service against a scraper.

The Copyright Act 98 of 1978 permits fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, review, and reporting current events, and a quotation exception for press summaries, but contains no text-and-data-mining exception; the pending Copyright Amendment Bill, 2017 would add a general fair use exception whose section 12A the Constitutional Court held constitutional in June 2026, but the Bill has not been signed into law, so no text and data mining (TDM)-specific exception currently exists.

South African copyright law confers no sui generis database right; a compilation is protected only as a literary work to the extent it shows sufficient skill or effort in selection or arrangement. The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) applies to personal information without a general carve-out for information that is publicly accessible, so scraping personal data from a public South African website remains subject to POPIA's lawful-processing conditions.

No South African statute or reported case establishes a scraping-specific unfair-competition, misappropriation, or trespass doctrine, and none assigns legal weight to a robots.txt directive or imposes an AI-training-specific rule.

South Africa has no social-media minor-access statute, app-store age-verification requirement, or age-appropriate design code, but has an adult-content age-verification and classification regime under the Films and Publications Act 65 of 1996, as amended by the Films and Publications Amendment Act 11 of 2019 (in force since 1 March 2022).

The amended Act lets a commercial online distributor apply to the Film and Publication Board for accreditation to self-classify the films, games, and publications it distributes, and bars distributing any film, game, or publication, whether self-classified or Board-classified, without a clearly visible label showing its age limit and content nature.

Knowingly distributing content classified X18, or content containing explicit sexual conduct that would justify an X18 classification, to a person under 18 years is a distinct offence carrying a fine of up to R750,000 or imprisonment of up to five years, independent of the general offence of distributing unclassified or refused-classification content.

South Africa has no press-publisher neighbouring right and no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code; the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 is the only enacted law reaching an aggregator's reproduction of news content.

Section 12(3) permits quoting from a lawfully public work, including a quotation from a newspaper or periodical article in the form of a press summary, subject to a fair-practice and extent-justified test with source and author attribution, and section 12(8)(a) removes copyright protection entirely from news of the day that are mere items of press information, a hot-news-adjacent carve-out with no reported decision applying it to a systematic aggregator.

No statute or reported case addresses whether a hyperlink is a communication to the public or whether framing changes the answer, and the Act predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out.

The pending Copyright Amendment Bill, 2017 would add a general fair use exception at section 12A reaching reproduction for research, criticism, reporting current events, and other purposes assessed against a four-factor test; the Constitutional Court held in June 2026 that section 12A is constitutional, but the Bill has not been signed into law, so no general fair use or text-and-data-mining exception currently exists.