Court Sides With LinkedIn in Data Scraping Lawsuit vs. hiQ Labs

LinkedIn emerged victorious in a nearly six-year-old lawsuit against hiQ Labs for data scraping. From a report: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the professional network, with Judge Edward Chen writing, "hiQ relied on LinkedIn for its data primarily by scraping wholly public LinkedIn profiles using automated software. hiQ had continuously attempted to circumvent LinkedIn's general technical defenses since May 2014.

"It experimented and attempted to reverse engineer LinkedIn's systems and to avoid detection by simulating human site-access behaviors. hiQ also hired independent contractors known as 'turkers' to conduct quality assurance while 'logged-in' to LinkedIn by viewing and confirming hiQ customers' employees' identities manually." hiQ Labs wound down its operations in 2018, although its servers continued running into 2019 to deliver on client contracts.

Chen wrote, "In sum, hiQ breached LinkedIn's user agreement both through its own scraping of LinkedIn's site and using scraped data, and through turkers' creation of false identities on LinkedIn's platform."

There are no winners here

[omnichad]

LinkedIn publishes things publicly using a protocol like HTTP and it is de facto published publicly. Circumventing any technical measures to artificially rate-limit viewing of public information really shouldn't fall under the CFAA or DMCA. The federal court initially actually upheld that.

On the other hand, by using real LinkedIn accounts to verify the scraped data, they bound themselves to the user agreement. If they had merely relied on public data, that shouldn't have legally applied to them. But it sounds like LinkedIn disguises its rate-limiting by returning fake profile data if you are detected as a bot rather than being denied.

Meanwhile, the users aren't protected by either entity. LinkedIn still lets search engines like Google index it all without a problem. And it's made clear to the user that the data all belongs to LinkedIn and not the user that generated their content.

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[Merk42]

MIKKKRO$OFT BAD!!11

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[gregarican]

I recall awhile back there was a LinkedIn data breach. Where lots of personal data was whisked away, to be used by bad actors. But even since then, it seems as if pretty decently targeted spearphishing pops up. Very employee role specific within the same organization. I suppose the public publishing makes it oh so simple.

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[drinkypoo]

I read the article and I still don't know what actually happened, because it is shit. It doesn't link to the decision, all it does is repeats a bunch of statements from a PR flack at linkedin. I'm sure this is literally the worst link on this subject, because this is slashdot, and I assume that they are lying about what the decision actually said because linkedin was always bullshit, but now it is owned by microsoft.

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[Petersko]

Circle jerk? Sure. Why not? But it's also THE starting point for job hunting for folks in professional services who lack personal connections to lean on.

I took a voluntary exit from a very long term employer a couple of years back. As part of the (rather sweet) exit deal, they provided me 6 months of access to an expensive outplacement firm. This included a group of people who's job it was to make my CV/resume shine (needed, after more than 20 years of never needing one), another group of industry-specific

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[Antique Geekmeister]

It's also very useful for those _with_ personal connections, to reach out to acquaintances for personal references. The practice can upset hiring managers who want to be the only source of information in the hiring process, especially when they already have a favorite candidate. I've run into this several times, for both some *very* good candidates and for some who never should have been considered.

Turker is my new go to epithet

[AmazingRuss]

Suck it turkers!

too late

[awwshit]

I think every scammer and his grandmother scrapes LinkedIn continuously. The barn door is wide open and the wolves already had a feast.