LinkedIn wins court order forcing data scrapers to delete millions of profiles
LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data
A California federal judge finalized a consent judgment requiring ProAPIs and Netswift to stop mass-scraping LinkedIn, halt data sales, abandon fake accounts, and delete scraped data. LinkedIn sued last October, alleging the firms ran millions of bogus accounts that harvested member, company, and school information plus reactions, comments, and posts. LinkedIn executive Sarah Wight called the outcome a win for user privacy.
Your profile is yours. What you choose to share on LinkedIn is meant for the professional community you're building, not for an outside company to scrape and use in ways you never agreed to.
- unified101
This isn't precedent setting.. it's a pure specific usecase that was blocked. Overall scraping is still legal and fine, per the earlier judgement.
- at1as
The broadly open internet is probably not long for this world. If you scrape using fake accounts, that clearly violates ToS you agree to. Whereas for public pages it's less clear how courts will rule.
With companies increasingly viewing their defenseability and value as their data, their online presence will become more gated, and curated through their managed experiences. Social media, news, reddit, etc are already like this, and it's not inconceivable that companies like Amazon, Ebay (who are fighting their own scraping battles) move the direction of sign in to visit more than a few pages.
This would mean that we'll all be forced to use accounts to see anything substantial within a site. And it'll be harder to view things across sites.
I know that this particular case is about scraping personal data, but I think it's a catalyst for many upcoming lawsuits that will broadly shift the internet in an undesirable direction
- collabs
I created a second LinkedIn account for testing purposes and recently I started getting this which I thought was strange as this account had been live for several years. What changed recently? Could this restriction also be because of the push to block mass scraping?
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Access to your account has been temporarily restricted
Why did this happen?
We take proactive actions to protect you when we detect potential unauthorized access or other activity that doesn’t comply with our policies.
What can I do next?
We first need to verify your identity to ensure your account safety. To regain access to your account, please submit a government-issued ID.
Learn more about verifying your identity.
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- reenorap
They should fix impersonation of employees and more importantly recruiters. I've had so much fake recruiters contact me, I can't tell who is real and who is fake anymore.
It's an easy fix, just have the recruiters verify with an email every month, but they don't so it makes me think they either encourage it or they really don't care because they benefit somehow.
- TrueDuality
Huh. Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content. Probably a good thing IMO. I would put money on the public statement by a LinkedIn official saying "Your profile is yours" will bite them in the future as they certainly don't treat it that way.