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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The account that the Botnet was using to scrape the data would have had to agree to the T's & C's
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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
They have a pretty standard severability clause - and those hold up in court just fine. If part of the contract is invalid / unenforceable, the rest still stands.
IANAL, but I'd say "no bots / no scraping" is probably perfectly valid legally speaking.
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
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.