You Can Now Legally Scrape Data from LinkedIn for Free

According to a new court ruling, scraping public data from a website does not qualify as hacking. The ruling came after a lengthy battle between the San Francisco based hiQ Labs Inc. and the Microsoft owned LinkedIn.

hiQ Labs had been scraping data off the business network’s public data and then selling it, combined with other datasets, to a list of employers. hiQ labs also scraped user profiles from LinkedIn and analyzed them for collecting workforce data.

After a long battle, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that LinkedIn cannot ask hiQ labs to stop pulling information from its platform since the data was publicly available to anyone with a web browser.

The circuit judge Marsha Berzon said,

There is little evidence that LinkedIn users who choose to make their profiles public actually maintain an expectation of privacy with respect to the information that they post publicly, and it is doubtful that they do. As to the publicly available profiles, the users quite evidently intend them to be accessed by others.

According to Berzon, the data is owned by the users, not by LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, tried to stop hiQ labs under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) passed in 1986. On this, the judge said, “LinkedIn could satisfy its ‘free rider’ concern by eliminating the public access option, albeit at a cost to the preferences of many users and, possibly, to its own bottom line,” since the data being scraped was not private.

The ruling distinguishes between how Facebook and LinkedIn guard their data. Facebook has limited and controlled access to its website by asking for an account to browse specific content. On the other hand, data being scraped from LinkedIn is available to everyone without needing an account on the website.

However, the court says that LinkedIn can still claim other violations like copyright infringement but the CFAA is ruled out. According to Forbes LinkedIn is looking to file an appeal.


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    Scraping is a data-gathering process that pulls relevant information from websites. LinkedIn, a Microsoft owned company, issued a formal letter asking HiQ to stop scraping the site because doing so violated its user agreement.


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