International privacy regulators are calling on social media giants to protect their users' publicly available information from web-scraping, a common business practice in the United States but one that in other jurisdictions could constitute a reportable data breach.

"Social media companies have obligations under U.K. data protection law to protect the information people post on their platforms," said Stephen Bonner, head of Britain's top privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). "We are seeing increased reports of mass data-scraping from social media and remind organizations that such incidents may require reporting to the ICO as a personal data breach."

The ICO was joined by 11 other data protection authorities—from China, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Jersey, New Zealand, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Morocco—in a statement that Bonner said should help provide "certainty, and consistency across borders, in how data protection applies to information people post online."