Botswana
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
Botswana presents low-to-moderate crawling risk. The Cybercrime and Computer Related Crimes Act 18 of 2018 s.4 criminalises unauthorised access to computer systems, but public websites carry implicit authorisation and the Act requires the access to be knowing and unauthorised. The Data Protection Act 18 of 2024 (in force 14 January 2025, replacing Act 32 of 2018) applies to any collection of personal data including from publicly available sources. Botswana's copyright regime (Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act 2000) uses an originality standard for compilations but does not establish a sui generis database right. No TDM exception exists. Public-page crawling of non-personal data is tolerable; personal-data collection requires a lawful basis; no scraping-specific case law exists.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | without permission |
| Public-page carve-out | unsettled |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | notice dependent |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | fair dealing narrow |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | unsettled |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | non binding notice |
| AI training-specific law | none |
| Privacy regime | Data Protection Act 18 of 2024 (Information and Data Protection Commission) |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-23. Confidence: medium. Not legal advice.