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LinkedIn Sues 100 Individuals For Scraping User Data From the Site (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Professional social network LinkedIn is suing 100 anonymous individuals for data scraping. It is hoped that a court order will be able to reveal the identities of those responsible for using bots to harvest user data from the site. The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data. Its lawsuit seeks to use the data scrapers' IP addresses and then discover their true identity in order to take action against them. LinkedIn says that a botnet has been used to gain access to user data which is then passed on to third parties. The site has a number of measures in place to prevent this type of data harvesting, but it seems that scrapers have found a way to circumvent these security restrictions. A series of automated tools -- FUSE, Quicksand, Sentinel, and Org Block -- are used to monitor suspicious activity and blocking scraping.
"hey, data scraping is our gig"
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Oh? https://blog.linkedin.com/2016...
http://harridanic.com
The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data.
Thanks to LinkedIn hackers are attempting to login to my accounts on sites like Steam, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, etc. Now, I know better and use different passwords for different sites. But, at least these sites have security in place to warn me of suspicious logins while denying the logins.
You publish a public document then get mad when people use it for their own purposes.... brilliant.
How about you just make user privacy a default so that anonymous users cannot see any information?
You would then see which throw away accounts are being used to log in to see the data...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Are they trying to say that's some kind of crime?
I know scanning the data from a yellow pages breaks copyright law, but using an army of typists to copy the same data from the same source is perfectly fine.
How does scraping data from a website measure up, assuming all scraped data is available to visitors through normal means (i.e. not using security holes).
At what point does using data from a website become "scraping" and at what point does it violate copyrights?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The charges are a bit trumped up and ridiculous. The illegal access by using a bot and breaking the legally binding user agreement is enough.
Claiming that it's a violation of the DMCA (anti-circumvention) and CFAA to circumvent their blacklisting procedures is silly. Not being on a blacklist is not a thing you "circumvent" nor is it a different kind of illegal access than using the bot in the first place.
How is the site offering security? If a bot can literally crawl/scrape your site, then given enough time, that is something a human could do as well. How is that data secure in any way?
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
This is just normal legal playbook. You sue for as high as you can and then settle for less. It is easier to go down in value than up. Though if you can get away with it the potential is there to profit more than you truly expect. It is both common business sense and abusive psychotic behavior.
So they're saying a botnet was used to gain access to the data, then passed on to third parties. Unless I'm mistaken, the IP addresses will be pointing to machines on the botnet, and the owners of those machines have no idea that is happening. It sounds like a lot of innocent people might get swept up in this.
Also ironic that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, who is no doubt responsible for the operating systems running on all those bots on the aforementioned botnet.
Proverbs 21:19
Other users giving my email address to linked in is likely a similar violation of my privacy. Who do I sue, linked in or people who didn't know better when they pressed the 'agree' button.
The whole linkedin connections thing is spooky in the way it finds links. I've had some people I knew suggested to me that should /never/ have made connections (and don't have my details) so linkedin has also been not only taking in data from users, but probably importing scraped datasets itself in order to improve it's connections.
I sense a potential sueball at linkedin here.
Congratulations your robots.txt didn't work. LinkedIn should really invest in better solutions. Which makes them just a 1/2 step above farcebook.
" The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data."
No, the Microsoft PURCHASED service, none of those users signed to hand their data to Microsoft, they just got shafted.
As to "the security it offers their data", Microsoft BOUGHT their data, LinkedIn handed all that lovely data over as part of the deal, yum yum yum.
LinkedIn itself implemented an API that is licenses to others to access that data, so basically, their entire business is selling your data to others. All the nice info on who works for whom on what projects, all that business intelligence, all waiting to be sold to competitors, recruiters, scalpers, intelligence agencies, anyone for any reason.
LinkedIn has this habit of asking for email passwords, then logging in as you (IMPERSONATING YOU TO THE EMAIL PROVIDER), data mining your contacts and emails, and using that to send fake emails, pretending to be you, inviting others to connect their accounts to yours. They KEEP the login details and REPEAT the data mining periodically to see if you have new contacts.
If you have the misfortune to have a LinkedIn account, now that thy are owned by Microsoft, there are a myriad of opportunities to cross link that data to Microsoft's advantage and your disadvantage. Microsoft paid $65 per USER, they can extract $65 of value from selling your data to others. Realize that, change your email password, stop updating your LinkedIn account (you can never undo the information you gave them), and walk away.
LinkedIn is the most idiotic brain dead company I've ever worked with.
I had a simple question: tell me how i can get the number of jobofferings that my customer's company has posted so i can show this number on their corporate site with a linked to LinkedIn. There must be an API for it, i've got OAuth2 credentials and a signed letter from the God/Darwin..
"Ah, but yes, but no, but yes, but no..."
Long story short, i've written a small program to check the LinkedIn site and get the value manu militari and it works great.
And I know this is not the same level as the bad-ass scrapers do, but I like to see LinkedIn tear in its own flesh...
The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data... LinkedIn says that a botnet has been used to gain access to user data which is then passed on to third parties.
Hmmm, I wonder what kind of computers that botnet runs on.
thats just a relationship map thing.
several people in your contacts list are connected closely to them and in a similar field.
that applies to all their suggestions. you just only recognise and therefore see the ones you actually recognise.
I love to see things like "The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data." in articles that are just reporting a "news story" but have no citations for said statements.
I was just refreshing your website every 20ms, not scraping any data.
How would you prove that any "scraping" took place, and why would it be illegal if it's publicly accessible information? If no security breach occurred, how is it different from other users accessing the same information?
Or is it just one of these american things where a corporation pays a large amount of money to lawyers and judges to imprison and/or financially ruin people that did something they didn't like?
Maybe /. should sue LinkedIn for spamming them about this lawsuit
Samples from the list of the 100 individuals being sued...
I. P. Freely
Mike Hunt
Hassant bin Laid
Prince Albert-in-a-can
Anna und Elsa
Bartman Simpson
etc, etc, etc
"The Microsoft-owned service takes pride in the relationship it has with its users and the security it offers their data."
Yes, and slave owners in 1700's took pride in the 'relationship' they had with their slaves and the security it offered their profits.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Why is LinkedIn using the CFAA hacking-related law to reveal details about a privacy-related issue. Data scraping is not hacking.
They're only pissed that people tried to take the data without paying them first.
Yet another reason to make sure everything you do online is anonymous. What's legal and reasonable today might not be tomorrow. Everything you do is saved forever.
As a matter of interest, what is the point of LinkedIn if not to pass my user profile to as many people as possible?
They should be hiring these bots, not taking action against them. The whole purpose of LinkedIn is a public advertisement for work. They like to pretend they are a "social network for business" but really all they are is a giant platform for classifieds, and within that purpose the bots are doing a great job.
I was a (brief) victim of a dating scam. After I got wise and cut them off, I wondered where how they profiled me. My "date" claimed she found me on a FB group but scammers hide their tricks. Googling a quick ego surf revealed that the only place any profile of mine shows up is LinkedIn, which I thought was private. Seeing that I got zero benefit from LinkedIn and I had no other profile stored anywhere, I promptly deleted my LinkedIn account.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The data is readily available if you get a salesman/vendor type account.
In fact, LinkedIn provides almost no value for the typical person. It's a platform to sell access to computer professional.
I get 10 requests to "link" with a saleman every week. I delete every one of them.
I get 5 requests to apply for jobs... in fields that are unrelated to my experience and degrees.
It's a crap platform these days, and you'd have to be dense not to get that.
Bing scrapes Youtube to index its contents. Bing is Microsoft owned.
It makes zero difference what EULA terms you put on a public website since the scraper doesn't read or agree to those terms. They don't use your service, they just index your website. If you don't like it Microsoft, don't publish the data publicly, keep the good stuff behind a login and monitor/limit accounts usage of those logins.
Put it this way, if you weren't scraping you, but you let others index the public data (e.g. Google, DuckDuckGo etc.), then they'd scrape Google and DuckDuckGo instead. Once you published it freely, without first showing a screen sayng "here is the EULA, you agree to this by clicking agree, we show you nothing till you agree", once you did that publishing freely, you lost control.
This is honestly pretty questionable, legally; I'll definitely be curious to see what the verdict is; it's typically extremely hard to get damages, for something, that's accessible to the public. That kind of goes both ways though: if this is accessible to the public, how is this different, legally, from reading it - then storing it.
Problem is the bots are reposting everything on other websites. It's all automated. Imagine your site content was stolen, layout redesigned, and hosted as another website. It will look different but has exact same data as yours. Scraping data isn't bad in itself. There are plenty of legitimate and quite frankly awesome uses for scraping. Hosting that data on another site without permission is illegal. It is theft. It's almost impossible for a developer to prevent CDN scrapers these days without legal action. For sites like LinkedIn they can see what accounts are being used to scrape from but since it's free registration they'll just create a new account. Multiply this by hundreds or thousands of accounts and it becomes very tedious for an admin to ban accounts on a daily basis. For the admins own sanity, legal action is a good thing.
If the folks running the bots are even half as smart as the average geek they'll never figure out who was behind it... but perhaps they'll get lucky? lol
I've already seen on LinkedIn quite a few guys posting stuff like "Hey this is a crappy Excel sheet that allegedly does what a ton of other applications already do better and for free, why don't you post your emails and I pinky promise I'll send it back to you". By the comment 10K someone says "hey, has anyone received the email?". By the comment 20K someone else says "I hope this is not a scam to harvest our email addresses. Anyway, my email is XXX".
My opinion is that they deserve it.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
......a bot which uses my own LinkedIn login and password? As it's my account and I am, a) gaining access to LinkedIn via the same methods I would do manually; and, b) reviewing data that I would also do so manually, would there be an issue? If so, under what premise/guise, etc.?
Is this the same LinkedIn that created a MITM proxy to scrape whatever it pleases from everyone's emails and proceed to mercilessly spam anyone you've ever known to join their happy little cult?
This is the same company now trying to sue people for scraping data from a publically accessible site?
http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2016/06/13/microsoft-buys-linkedin-these-etfs-are-poised-to-jump/
How dare you post a Microsoft story and call it Linkedin?
Also, if you are going to sue for scraping data.. FBI would be the defendants vs over 200 million litigants.
The FBI not only scrape ALL YOUR DATA (Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Markmonitor/Cloudflare/Twitter/more), they share it internationally because the FBI is full of moles.
They also murder people like Ian Murdock who won't go along with their plan, so they can get more access to more people's private data.
They are like ticks and fleas. They want to know all your shit just for a paycheck, no matter who is paying it. Pieces of shits. .. AND Slashdot is FBI.
No one agreed to shit
And it won't hold up in court
Hire good lawyers instead of good developers.
Time to get off LinkedIn. What's the best alternative?