Is Scraping Google Maps Legal in the UK?
This question stops more people from building a lead list than any other, and it usually gets answered badly — either "scraping is illegal" or "it's public data, do what you like". Neither is right.
The honest answer is that it depends on three separate questions that people tend to blur into one: whether you are breaching a contract, whether you are infringing copyright or database rights, and whether you are handling personal data lawfully. They have different answers.
This is a general explanation, not legal advice. If you are operating at serious scale, take proper advice.
Scraping Is Not a Criminal Act in Itself
There is no UK law that makes collecting publicly visible information from a website a crime. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 concerns unauthorised access to computer systems — getting past a login you have no right to use, defeating access controls, that sort of thing. Reading a page that anyone with a browser can read is not unauthorised access.
So the question is not "is scraping legal" in the abstract. It is what your specific collection does, and what you then do with the result.
The Terms of Service Question
Google's terms restrict automated access to Google Maps outside of its official APIs. Breaching those terms is a contractual matter between you and Google, not a criminal one. In practice the consequences are commercial: rate limiting, IP blocking, or losing an account.
This is the cleanest reason to use the Google Places API rather than scraping the Maps interface directly. You get the same underlying business data through a sanctioned route, with defined usage terms and no ambiguity about whether you are breaching anything. It costs money per request, which is a real consideration at volume, but it removes the entire category of problem.
It is worth knowing which route a tool you're paying for actually uses. Tools built on the official API are operating inside Google's terms. Tools that scrape the Maps front end are not, and that risk transfers to you in the form of a service that can stop working without notice.
Copyright and Database Rights
Individual facts — a business's name, address, and phone number — are not protected by copyright. Facts aren't copyrightable in the UK, and a business's trading address is about as factual as data gets.
Two things around the edges are protected. Creative content is: review text, photographs, and editorial descriptions carry copyright belonging to whoever wrote or took them. Copying those wholesale is a different proposition from copying a phone number.
The other is database right, which protects substantial investment in obtaining, verifying, or presenting a database's contents. Extracting a substantial part of a protected database can infringe it even where no individual item is protected. In practice this matters far more if you are rebuilding a competing directory than if you are pulling a few hundred local businesses to contact.
The pragmatic line most people land on: collect the factual contact fields, leave the reviews and photos alone, and don't republish a copy of the directory.
The Part That Actually Matters: Personal Data
This is where the real obligations live, and it is the question most people skip.
UK GDPR applies to personal data, which means information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual. A generic business address like info@company.co.uk is generally not personal data. A named individual's work email — sarah.jones@company.co.uk — generally is, even in a business context. Sole traders and partnerships are a particular trap, because the business and the person are often the same legal entity.
If your list contains personal data, you have obligations regardless of how lawfully you collected it. You need a lawful basis, which for B2B prospecting is usually legitimate interests, and that requires you to have actually carried out and documented the balancing test rather than just naming it. You need to provide privacy information, and where you collected data indirectly rather than from the person, that generally means telling them within a month or at first contact. You need to honour objections and erasure requests. And you should not keep data indefinitely just because you once scraped it.
There is a detailed walkthrough of the sending-side rules — PECR, the corporate subscriber distinction, and what a compliant B2B cold email looks like — in the cold email and GDPR guide.
The Practical Summary
Collecting factual business contact data from Google Maps is not illegal in the UK. Use the official API rather than scraping the interface, and the terms of service question goes away too. Leave reviews and photographs alone. Then treat the compliance work as being about what you store and how you use it, because that is where the enforceable obligations actually are.
If you want to see what a compliant sourcing workflow looks like end to end, the Google Maps lead generation guide walks through it, and the comparison of Google Maps scraping tools covers which tools use the official API and which don't.