LinkedIn can't block data company from mining its publicly available listings, court rules

LinkedIn, the vast online professional and career-development network, can’t prevent a San Francisco data analytics company from mining the network’s roster of members for information it can sell to job recruiters, a federal appeals court ruled Monday in a case that has already made one visit to the U.S. Supreme Court.The company, hiQ Labs, founded in 2012, uses bots — robotic software — to gather data such as work history and skills from the publicly available listings on LinkedIn, which has 810 million members, and then analyzes the information and markets it to clients. LinkedIn sent hiQ Labs a cease-and-desist order in 2017 seeking to halt the searches, saying they violated its own terms of access as well as federal and state privacy and technology laws. After U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed hiQ Labs to continue its work, the Supreme Court took up the case last June and told the appeals court to reconsider it in light of a recent decision by the high court defining the limits of access. On Monday, the appeals court said its conclusion was unchanged: The information hiQ “scrapes” from the LinkedIn network…
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