Request for Public Statement on Ethical Web Crawling and Responsible AI Data Use

[robomotic]

Dear Firecrawl Team,

I’m writing to you as the founder of the Responsible AI Database organization, which is dedicated to promoting transparency and ethical standards in the collection and use of web data—especially as it relates to the training of AI systems.

As Firecrawl gains visibility as a powerful tool for real-time web crawling and page summarization, we believe it’s important for developers, content owners, and the broader AI community to understand how your system handles key ethical and legal considerations around web scraping and data reuse.

To that end, we respectfully request a public statement from Firecrawl detailing your current policies and practices with regard to:

Respect for Robots.txt and Site Terms
Whether Firecrawl adheres to website crawling directives (robots.txt), including restrictions on paths and rate-limiting, and how those preferences are enforced by your system.

Crawl Rate Limiting and Resource Sensitivity
What technical or default settings are in place to prevent overloading servers, especially for smaller or self-hosted sites.

Privacy and Data Minimization
Whether Firecrawl has mechanisms to avoid collecting personal, sensitive, or unnecessary data; how long crawled data is retained; and how privacy or data protection laws like the GDPR are considered in your design.

Copyright, Licensing, and Attribution
How Firecrawl handles content that may be under copyright, and whether it distinguishes between content that is freely reusable (e.g., Creative Commons) versus content with restrictions.

AI Model Training and Commercial Use of Crawled Data
Whether Firecrawl permits or advises against using crawled content for training AI models—especially commercial ones—without explicit permission from content owners, and how such use is communicated to your users.

Transparency and Opt-Out Mechanisms
Whether Firecrawl provides tools or guidance for website owners to opt out of crawling or request removal of their content from cached or indexed results.

A public-facing statement or policy on these issues would go a long way in building trust among developers, site owners, and those concerned with responsible AI development. It also helps clarify how Firecrawl differs (or aligns) with other tools on the market that access and reuse web content.

We’d be happy to provide input, collaborate on best practices, or help amplify your response to the wider community once published.

Looking forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
Phd. Paolo Di Prodi
Founder, Responsible AI Database
www.robomotic.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/responsible-ai-dataset-initiative