Scraping Data From LinkedIn Profiles Is Legal, Appeals Court Rules – Forbes

Topline An appeals court Monday ruled that web scraping—or automatically extracting information from websites and storing it for later use—is legal, protecting a tool used by researchers but dealing a blow to Microsoft-owned social networking site LinkedIn, which claimed the practice endangers user privacy. LinkedIn has attempted to stop other companies from automatically harvesting data from its user … [+] profiles. getty Key Facts The U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals affirmed its 2019 preliminary injunction stopping LinkedIn from blocking data company hiQ Labs from accessing publicly visible LinkedIn member profiles. HiQ uses data scraped from public sections of LinkedIn to create reports for corporate customers, identifying which of their employees are most likely to quit and which are most likely to be targeted by recruiters. In a 2017 cease and desist letter to hiQ’s CEO, LinkedIn said it had implemented “technical measures” to prevent the company from accessing the site, and claimed using the social network without LinkedIn’s authorization would violate the 1986 Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits activity like hacking and cyberattacks. Additionally, LinkedIn told the court an injunction allowing hiQ to resume scraping would threaten users’ privacy and possibly damage the goodwill built up between…
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