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Legal

GDPR

GDPR is the EU regulation governing personal data. A named business address like anna@clinic.com is personal data under it, even though it belongs to a company — which is the point most lead-generation advice gets wrong.

Public availability does not remove data from the regulation's scope. That a phone number is printed on a shopfront does not create permission to load it into a CRM; it only means collecting it was not itself unlawful access.

For B2B outreach the usual lawful basis is legitimate interest, which is real but conditional. It requires that you assess and can document the balance between your interest and the recipient's expectations, that you tell people where you got their data on first contact, and that you can act on a deletion request across every system holding it.

Generic addresses sit differently. info@clinic.com identifies a function rather than a person, so it is weaker as personal data — though a regulator will still look at whether a single individual is obviously behind it, which at a two-person business they usually are.

None of this is legal advice. It is a map of what the questions are, so you can ask a lawyer the right one.

Goes deeper: Is Scraping Google Maps Legal?

Related terms

CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM is the US law governing commercial email. It permits cold outreach without prior consent, provided the headers are accurate, the message is identifiable, a physical address is included and opt-outs are honoured within ten business days.
Opt-out
An opt-out is a recipient's request to stop being contacted. Honouring it is a legal requirement in every major market and has to apply across every list you hold, not just the campaign it came from.
Web scraping
Web scraping is reading a web page with a program and pulling structured data out of it. It is how nearly all business contact data is collected, including by vendors who avoid the word.
Cold email
A cold email is a message to a business that has had no prior contact with you. It is lawful in most B2B contexts under specific conditions, and it works only when the list is right and the message is specific.