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Supreme Court Revives LinkedIn Bid To Shield Personal Data 38

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave Microsoft's LinkedIn another chance to try to stop rival hiQ Labs from harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles -- a practice that LinkedIn contends threatens the privacy of its users. From a report: The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had barred LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to the information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available. At issue is whether companies can use a federal anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, to block competitors from harvesting or "scraping" vast amounts of customer data from public-facing parts of a website. The justices sent the dispute back to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider in light of their June 4 ruling that limited the type of conduct that can be criminally prosecuted under the same law. In that case, the justices found that a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.
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Supreme Court Revives LinkedIn Bid To Shield Personal Data More

Supreme Court Revives LinkedIn Bid To Shield Personal Data

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  • This is truly hilarious (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:33PM (#61487130)

    The idea that LinkedIn gives a flying fsck about its users' privacy is absolutely side-splitting. Their only concern is that somebody else might be getting hold of the same information they want to sell to any third party with enough bucks to interest them, and thereby decreasing its value.

    LinkedIn is even creepier and more intrusive than Facebook, and that's saying lot.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 )

      The idea that LinkedIn gives a flying fsck about its users' privacy is absolutely side-splitting. Their only concern is that somebody else might be getting hold of the same information they want to sell to any third party with enough bucks to interest them, and thereby decreasing its value.

      LinkedIn is even creepier and more intrusive than Facebook, and that's saying lot.

      You are giving LinkedIn far more credit than they are worth (you corporate lackey you :-) ) . They don't care if people get their hands on the data as long as it's people like the Chinese or Russian secret service who will keep quiet about it and not compete in the advertising market. In fact, as a Microsoft company, they probably sell to the NSA direct and treat it as a major revenue stream.

    • Yeah. I lost access to FuckedIn because of calling some zionist pigs what they are and they demanded from me that I send them my scanned ID or passport. Well, I elected instead to not have FuckedIn account.

  • Ironic (Score:1, Troll)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 )

    Anyone remember when Microsoft (MSN messenger) literally hacked into AOL Instant Messenger (reverse engineered the protocol and to get users/contact lists)? Talk about hypocrisy.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, literally no one remembers that because it never happened and you're making it up.

      Perhaps you're confusing the fact Microsoft reversed engineered AIM to allow MSN Messenger to interop with the AIM network so that users could talk to people on both AIM and MSN Messenger from a single client? That's not the same thing, interoperability isn't "hacking into", so stop talking shit and spreading lies just because you have a weird irrational hatred of MS. There's plenty of things they've done wrong over the ye

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yeah, instead you should pick on them for the dodgy practices that they're trying to prevent companies like hiQ from using: scraping IETF public mailing lists to send everybody "Welcome to LinkedIn! Click here to complete your profile" emails.

      • AOL didnâ(TM)t authorize or like them doing that and tried to block it numerous times. Microsoft kept trying to work around those blocks. Microsoft was unauthorized to do it and AOL suffered a loss because many users switched to MSN Messenger. Thatâ(TM)s hacking.

      • Also, if it wasnâ(TM)t hacking why did Microsoft have to make an agreement with them as part of a $750 million settlement? Note that settlement with AOL was over Netscape AND MSN messenger.

    • And with AOL in the position of power, they blocked third party IM clients like MSN and Trillian through serverside updates [archive.org] in a cat and mouse game. When Microsoft was small in a market they played the reverse engineering game and AOL blocked it in power. However, as far as I can tell, Microsoft played cat-and-mouse - but there were no lawsuits from Microsoft saying that they had a "right" to connect to AOL's network/AOL not to block them.

      With Microsoft in the position of power they're blocking a competi

  • I wish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Monday June 14, 2021 @03:50PM (#61487170) Journal

    I wish I could care about this, but it just ain't happening.

    Fuck MS, fuck LinkedIn, fuck them all.

    • In spite of your positions on this specific matter and the companies involved, there can still be reason to care as the outcome can shape future situations, legal or not. Prior cases often effect future cases.

  • In that case, the justices found that a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.

    Did the 9th circus just abolish most of the CFAA?

  • a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.

    Well way to bake in an assumption there, that any use of publicly viewable data is "misuse".

    Otherwise, how do your define misuse?

    There seems to be a very disturbing trend of people claiming that things that are publicly viewable and knowable, are somehow still private... that's not how private works, it goes against the very definition of what private means.

    You doin't want information

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Sure, so if your sensitive personal information gets stolen and published to the public internet then you're obviously at fault and deserve no recourse to remove it.

      I suggest you learn what the word "private" actually means:

      https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]

      : intended for or restricted to the use of a particular person, group, or class

      : not known or intended to be known publicly : SECRET

      I'm assuming you know what the word "intended" means, if not, you should start there. Something being publicly available do

    • > a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.

      > Well way to bake in an assumption there, that any use of publicly viewable data is "misuse".

      > Otherwise, how do your define misuse?

      It looks like you missed the word NOT. Since you can NOT be held liable under the law for misuse (or obviously for proper use), there is no need to define misuse. The "assumption baked in" is that it doesn't MATTER if it's misuse or not - it's

  • IANAL, so I don't understand why this isn't a copyright issue. I am free to write what ever I want into the forms on Linked-In. Why does my public persona have less protection than other fictional personas, like, for example: Sherlock Holmes.

    • You can't copyright facts, or generally obvious collections of related facts without some minimal creative expression. For example the data in a phone book isn't protected by copyright. The ingredients for a recipe generally can't be protected, but if your directions have significant creative expression, that portion might be able to be. You still can't stop people from striping out the facts of how to prepare and cook the dish and publishing it themselves in whatever format they like or rewriting it in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sloppy ( 14984 )

        I'm not an expert on linked in but your public persona on linked in likely is a collection of facts about you which are impossible to protect by copyright.

        I think you're missing his comparison to maps, but to be fair, he wasn't explicit. Maps are generally thought to be collections of facts, but some maps have some deliberate, creative, copyrighted lies on them. You don't know whether a particular LinkedIn entry is a collection of facts, or creative fiction. And if it's fiction, you don't know whose fiction

  • Definitely. This makes some sense. LinkedIn is doing absolutely well! https://datingreporters.com/ [datingreporters.com]
  • why is it public? Trick question, the Supreme Court is packed with pro-corporate judges now, and they're gonna side with whichever fish is bigger.

  • harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles -- a practice that LinkedIn contends threatens the privacy of its users.

    • LinkedIn users have provide there personal data within the terms defined by the user agreement. They have not given their data to the scraper, they have no agreement the person. Private doesn't mean no-body know, it mean the person is able to exercise control over who knows.

  • LinkedIn is so desperate to block competitors they want it to be illegal for competitors to see the data that anyone else can see. This is stupid beyond belief; only a lawyer would even consider pursuing a claim like this.

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