LinkedIn has had a court victory in its long-running battle against hiQ Labs, which has been scraping publicly accessible LinkedIn user data for use in its own recruitment insights app. The case started in 2017 when LinkedIn sought legal intervention to cut off hiQ Labs from its service after discovering that the former had been harvesting LinkedIn user data to build its own recruitment information service.
Case Scraped!
hiQ Labs uses LinkedIn profile information to build its own set of data profiles that, according to them, can predict when an employee is more likely to leave a company. LinkedIn has argued that this is against its user agreement (i.e users did not give consent for their information to be used this way) and therefore violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The case has since gone back and forth and has become a precedent-setting example for data scraping and what can be done legally with publicly available online information.
Against hiQ’s initial expectations, the court has ruled in favor of LinkedIn, to which LinkedIn’s Chief Legal Counsel Sarah Wight explains:
“Today in the hiQ legal proceeding, the Court announced a significant win for LinkedIn and our members against personal data scraping, among other platform abuses. The Court ruled that LinkedIn’s User Agreement unambiguously prohibits scraping and the unauthorized use of scraped data as well as fake accounts, affirming LinkedIn’s legal positions against hiQ for the past six years. The Court also found that hiQ knew for years that its actions violated our User Agreement and that LinkedIn is entitled to move forward with its claim that hiQ violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”
This is a significant win and will allow LinkedIn to once again challenge hiQ’s usage of its users’ information, while as noted, the case also has implications for all social networks in regards to what data others can use from their apps.
Meta is also in the process of legal proceedings to ward off data scraping, with the company launching legal action against two developers back in 2020 for creating browser extensions that extracted user data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Amazon under the guise of selling marketing intelligence to other services.
The Wrap
It’s rather direct news and the broader implications here are that if no legal recourse can be established, the platforms are then forced to hide more information behind log-in walls, essentially locking it and protecting against misuse. While that’s good for individual platforms, it can also limit discoverability since Google will no longer be able to index posts. The case highlights regulatory gaps concerning data misuse and the need to establish clearer regulations around the use of personal data. LinkedIn will return to the courts to push for an official ruling on the case.
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