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Judge Says LinkedIn Cannot Block Startup From Public Profile Data (reuters.com)
A U.S. federal judge on Monday ruled that LinkedIn cannot prevent a startup from accessing public profile data, in a test of how much control a social media site can wield over information its users have deemed to be public. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles. The dispute between the two tech companies has been going on since May, when LinkedIn issued a letter to hiQ Labs instructing the startup to stop scraping data from its service. HiQ Labs responded by filing a suit against LinkedIn in June, alleging that the Microsoft-owned social network was in violation of antitrust laws. HiQ Labs uses the LinkedIn data to build algorithms capable of predicting employee behaviors, such as when they might quit. "To the extent LinkedIn has already put in place technology to prevent hiQ from accessing these public profiles, it is ordered to remove any such barriers," Chen's order reads. Meanwhile, LinkedIn said in a statement: "We're disappointed in the court's ruling. This case is not over. We will continue to fight to protect our members' ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn."
We will continue to fight to protect our members' ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn
If users added their info, and made it public, it's not up to LinkedIn to decide what users want to protect.
Besides, given LinkedIn's past behavior with scraping people's contacts/address books on their PCs and email accounts, it has no lessons to give anyone else.
AC comments get piped to
It doesn't surprise me that people who do lots of edits to their LinkedIn profile are looking for a new job. I think I will start a business that scrapes LinkedIn too. Free money, low barrier to entry.
You sound like a Neo-Nazi.
There should be no difference between a human reading the site and a machine. If it is able to be accessed by a person then it should be ok to scrape and aggregate it.
If that is burden to the site they should consider an API to reduce the burden.
If they are truly concerned then change what is publicly displayed.
Read https://linkedin.com/robots.tx...
Especially at the end
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
"We will continue to fight to protect our members' ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn."
Translates to
"We will continue to fight to protect our profits and our ability to control and sell the information they make available on LinkedIn "
LinkedIn's servers are their private property, and they should have the right to decide who can access them.
In the physical world, there are many places that are generally "open to the public", but they are private property, and the property owner can order you to leave and never come back. If you come back again it's called trespassing, and it's a criminal offense. You can and will be arrested, and if you go to trial, you will be convicted. It's well settled law.
I don't see why the LinkedIn situation is any different. The fact that LinkedIn are hypocritical corporate assholes doesn't change the legal analysis.
Microsoft bought Linkedin to profit off of users data. Users on Linkedin specifically post info so it is shared. Most users were members long before MS bought the social network. I certainly didn't have any say in this purchase, or my data. I don't appreciate that they can buy my public data, 3rd party website or not, and then act holier than though about it.
I'm not sure MS could create a social network that worked based on their past history. They've already changed the behavior of the site to promote more clicks and revenue, which would have seriously turned me off if they were in place when it started. Unfortunately, I put up, for now.
For MS to go to court and now say they are protecting their users is shameful. By throwing the users in front of the judge for their purposes is using the users as human shields. We all know this is about profits, and not being saved from another evil corp.
Apply this to Microsoft's practices across their platform, and its the users that need further protections from them. For them to throw us in front of a judge to claim this is for anything, even semi related to privacy, is a joke.
At best, this is the pot calling the kettle black.
By your logic, they should revise their statement then:
We will continue to fight to protect our data we extracted from our members and the ability to control the information they make available to us, here on LinkedIn"
Quick, there's still time for you to call them and tell them to revise it!
AC comments get piped to
so just tell them that it's not about the data being public, but about linkedin hosting the data for non-commercial use , get creative, i'm sure you could quantify HiQ constant scraping in terms of cost of bandwidth and any maintenance issues it might trigger and use this as the basis for defence ... just putting it out there, not sure it would even make sense in terms of american law, but it might work
u sound like a fucking parrot stop repeating yourself in every thread
The Company reserves the right to limit the availability of the Sites and/or the provision of any product or service described thereon to any person, geographic area, or jurisdiction it so desires at any time and in our sole discretion and to limit the quantities of any such product or service that we provide.
Slashdot's terms and conditions can't override federal law. When there is a conflict, federal law applies.
Any other questions?
So accessing the public profiles is to be allowed unless its done in such a way as to create unnatural load on their servers, something akin to a DDoS attack. They can set a throttle on hits per minute for programmed access. Or provide an API so HiQ and others can access the public profile info without impacting user facing servers, except the users get an additional profile security option to allow API access and default it to Off for everyone initially so they can opt in.
until the whopper at the end.
Am I the only one here who actually tried to read the article? The summary points to the wrong article: "Tech companies in the crosshairs on white supremacy and free speech".
The LinkedIn article is here.
Link leads to an article about Google shutting down Daily Stormer. Yay for editors.
please
"We will continue to fight to protect our members' ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn"
I need a new irony meter
Can someone please explain to me why Microsoft bought LinkedIn ?
THey basically paid 26B which amounts to hundreds of $$ per profile. Why ?
They will never make a fraction of that back, and now this...
...Linkedin from rate-limiting the scraping. For example, limit scraping to 1 page ever 10 seconds after the 100th page request within 100 seconds. That would solve their problem.
Simply add an option "Allow third part sites to scrape my data " or "Allow my data to be shared with third parties" and default it to OFF
This is a privacy enhancement. Good luck with hiQ arguing that one (and frankly companies like that could go and fuck a duck).
Linkedin wants to have their cake and eat it, too. The users post their data for all interested parties to see, unless they put some explicit restrictions (e.g. friends only). Linkedin then add all sorts of artificial limits on visibility, search, and god forbid you try to fetch that data with a script. Suddenly it is no longer the person's data shared as they want, but Linkedin's data intended for monetization.
I understand they have expenses incurred by careless bots. It is possible to traffic shape the active connections, or provide a reasonable API, without being greedy and hypocritical, obfuscating the data that is not yours, and pretending it is about the user protection.
See subject "naughty boy" (because I know, for a fact, you're scraping others' data too - fess up now, or I'll spill more)...
APK
P.S.=> LIMITLESS... apk
LinkedIn should have a right to keep anyone from using their property - their servers.
If this case involved any company other than Microsoft and I guess maybe Oracle this conversation will be going very differently.
And everyone knows APK is a dickbag stalker who does the same.
Is it hard being that big of a douche or is it just a natural ability unequaled anywhere else in nature?
Also can you learn how to write a comment, as your dumb "See subject" in every post just advertises your total stupidity.
The ruling is certainly a tradeoff for the Internet.
(Lowers content creation funding, but raises content access freedoms.)
I think on balance it's a good thing.
Here's the kernel of hiq's argument.
28. LinkedIn is thus improperly using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act and related state penal code and trespass law, not as a shield – as
intended by those laws – to prevent harmful hacking and unauthorized computer access, but as a
sword to stifle competition and assert propriety control over data in which it has no exclusive
interest. In other words, LinkedIn recognizes it has no valid propriety or copyright interest, so it
claims only that it has a propriety interest to control access to its website, treating that digital
realm as though it were physical real property. Not only is the analogy inapposite, but LinkedIn
ignores that the public profile data of members would not reside on its website in the first place
but for its express promise that the date would be public for all to see and use. Thus, while
LinkedIn can certainly prevent abusive access to its website, it should not be allowed to pervert
the purpose of the laws at issue by using them to destroy putative competitors, engage in unlawful
and unfair business practices and suppress the free speech rights of California citizens and
businesses as alleged more fully herein.
http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/historical/1491/
Not sure where linkedin;'s response or the ruling are?
Your ads are dangerous. Why you may ask? Because you're worse than a regular advertising company! You keep a dossier on people, tracking all their posts, trying to find out their Internet history and keep records, you've been known since the 90s on the Internet as someone who contacts people's ISPs if you have sufficient details, you contact their web hosting providers, people's companies where they work to make a scene because they dared to disagree with you on the Internet. You ironically are the antithesis of safety online, you harass, provoke, stalk and it often starts with one of your advertisements. You have people tell you to go away and leave them alone, but you continue to pursue them, make legal threats etc. until you are satisfied. You are one of he few advertisers out there that I can actually point at and show that you are using information gathered against other people! In summary, the most dangerous advertisements people need to be weary of is yours, APK. Your adblocking solution does nothing to stop them either.
Take that in your poopoo hole Microsoft!
We block people from scraping our clients' sites all the time, because it places excess load on the server.
We played cat and mouse with one for awhile ... eventually, they emailed a generic address with our client and said they weren't going to give up, so we should just make an easy to consume feed available to them. I laid it out to the client and said they might want to consider it, but they didn't go for it.
I can't imagine a court order mandating us to allow scrapers.
they havent had an original thought since the 40's.
We played cat and mouse with one for awhile ... eventually, they emailed a generic address with our client and said they weren't going to give up
This is when you get your attorney to write up a Cease and Decist letter and reply back to the scraper's E-mail, AND now they have been warned and ordered by the owner of the property to stop, and further actions can result in a lawsuit or criminal charges regarding Unauthorized Access/Access In Excess of Authorization.
Except that hiq's lawyers asked linkedin to show any excessive server loads and they could not show any problems.
No harm + no copyrights => ok?
Shut up Nadella you sweaty insect bell-end.
...for bandwidth used.
If you'd bothered to RTFA before commenting you'd have noticed the link doesn't go to the story mentioned, it links to an article about Charlottesville.