Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Yes. They're trying to turn a civil suit about a breach in contract into a criminal charge of anti-circumvention (DMCA) of their IP blacklist procedures and CFAA and criminal trespass for the access to the nearly public profiles that anyone with a free account can view.
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.