Data Scraping public athlete name and performance data. Does this need to be treated as personal data?

Question

Consider the following data for amateur/professional athletes:

• Athlete name,
• Athletic event + best performance data

e.g.:

• Joe Bloggs
• 5k 19:00
• 10k 40:00
• Half Marathon 85:00
• other events etc...

and high level system outline:

• Data is collected from publicly available sources (data scraping)
• Data is stored (cached) for up to one year
• Data is made publicly available in a ranking format

Which personal data or copyright (or other) legal considerations need to be made about this data?

Is there a difference between doing this kind of thing for team results or individual results?

Answer 1

Although this information does indeed count as personal data, I don't think it would be subject to GDPR requirements, on freedom of information grounds. This use seems like the "journalistic purposes" referenced in Article 85. (If you follow that link, you can see how which GDPR requirements you would be specifically exempted from.) Recital 153 also says that "journalistic purposes" should be interpreted broadly:

In order to take account of the importance of the right to freedom of expression in every democratic society, it is necessary to interpret notions relating to that freedom, such as journalism, broadly.

Answer 2

If the information you are scrapping is from publicly accessible websites then you should not have to worry about it.

For example if you scrape data from IMDB about actors and their biographies then you should not have any issues.

However if you are scrapping Social Security Numbers or Bank Account numbers or any other sensitive material that is you have paid for through a service or are finding on some random Obscure site then you will have a huge problem.

Also publishing any information obtained by a service that you have payed for can possibly land you in legal trouble for example MIT boy Aaron Scwartz. The Internets Own boy co-founder of Reddit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M0GQww1GoY. He had copied from JSTOR books and published them on his website. He wanted to make this public accessible to the hence the public. Well JSTOR foundout and had him put in prison and considered him a criminal. Just to explain what JSTOR is really quick is the online database for scholarly articles, books, magazines and much more. It is highly copyrighted and step on that copyright you are in for a huge legal battle and possible jail time or imprisonment.

Certain data that is off limits is Personal Medical Info, SSN, Medical Reports, Financial Identifications, Academic Records, PCI data, IP Addresses and much more.