Uruguay

Summary

Uruguay presents moderate-low risk for crawling. Ley 20.327 (2024) — the country's first dedicated cybercrime law — criminalises illicit access to computer data (Art. 297 bis, Penal Code) but, consistent with civil-law tradition, the offence requires bypassing a security mechanism or acting without authorisation; public-page scraping is not the paradigm case. Uruguay holds EU-adequate status under Law 18.331 (2008, recognised EC Decision 2012/484/EU), administered by the URCDP; personal data scraped from public websites is covered and carries no blanket "publicly available" exemption, making privacy the most live risk for PII-heavy crawls. Copyright Law 9.739 (as amended through Law 19.857/2019) uses a narrow closed-list of exceptions — no fair-use doctrine and no TDM exception — so scraping and indexing copyrighted content for AI training is likely infringement. No sui generis database right exists; database protection is limited to compilations meeting the originality threshold. Overall, pure-public-page crawling of non-personal, non-copyrighted government data is tolerable; personal data and copyrighted content require minimisation and caution.