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.

Comments

LinkedIn Response in Summary

[damn_registrars]

"hey, data scraping is our gig"

Security my Ass

[ketomax]

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.

So...

[The-Ixian]

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...

Is data scraping illegal?

[mwvdlee]

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?

Scammers harvest LinkedIn for victims

[AnalogDiehard]

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.