Scraping, harvesting, or extracting is a process of getting all the information from some public site. It automates manual exporting of the data. If you buy a list from anyone online to add listings to your site, chances are they are scraping data from another source such as Google Maps to give you that information. This is using the same process only automates it for you to auto add to your directory. Many court cases have ruled that automated scraping of publicly accessible data does not violate the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Court cases change over time and there may be location specific laws to your specific regional area or country. DirectoryImport always suggests you seek the counsel of an attorney in your specific area to ensure compliance with the laws in your jurisdiction. It is always an option to not use the data scraping option to import listing data information. In that case, the Google API will be used to load information dynamically from that API each time a listing is loaded and will be subject to usage limits/charges per the normal Google API agreement.