LinkedIn’s ongoing battle with data scraping rages on, with a new appeals court ruling once again going against the company. The Court of Appeals has essentially ruled that scraping of publicly available data is legal and that LinkedIn has no grounds to block access to third-party providers who scan its user profiles for their own use.

Here’s a quick case summary for additional context. LinkedIn wanted to cut off hiQ Labs from its service after discovering that hiQ had been scraping LinkedIn user data, harvesting the personal information on publicly available profiles of LinkedIn users to build its own recruitment information service.

A Public Display

hiQ Labs makes use of LinkedIn profile information to build data profiles that can predict when an employee is more likely to leave a company. hiQ then decided to take LinkedIn to court over its move to restrict access. The case has since shuffled up and down various appeals processes, becoming a precedent-setting example in the battle against illegal data scraping more broadly.

The latest decision, handed this week by the Ninth Circuit of Appeals, is that “data scraping that’s publicly accessible isn’t in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.” This ruling also supports the 2019 court ruling, which also found that it’s legal for any company to access and use publicly available user data, regardless of the platform. Users have no right to govern this expanded usage.

It does sound a bit off, no? It makes sense why LinkedIn is pushing against this, but at the same time, as noted by Tech Crunch, the broader implications for data scraping also relate to archivists, academics, and researchers who also use tools to scrape information on mass for alternative purposes. There is research value in such a process, but there should also be a middle ground or at least some level of restriction. This is the basis for Meta’s legal action against data-scraping, which it launched back in 2020, taking two companies to court over browser extensions that extracted user data from social platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and even Amazon “in order to sell ‘marketing intelligence’ and other services.”

The same case is also still ongoing. In any case, it would seem that current laws are outdated in regards to data scraping from social platforms, which, if unchanged, could eventually see social apps further restricting publicly available user info.

The Wrap

There are a lot of dynamics that go into consideration here, too many to discuss in detail. What we know is that both LinkedIn and Meta have already significantly reduced access to publicly available user information and it’s unlikely that they’ll reverse this decision.

In any case, LinkedIn will choose to challenge the ruling once again, stating that:

“We’re disappointed in the court’s decision. This is a preliminary ruling and the case is far from over. We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn. When your data is taken without permission and used in ways you haven’t agreed to, that’s not okay. On LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, which is why we prohibit unauthorized scraping on our platform.”

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Sources

https://bit.ly/3v0dcuw