LinkedIn Ordered To Allow Third Party Data Scraping

A startup has won a legal case against Microsoft LinkedIn and has been allowed to scrape data publicly posted by users of the platform. LinkedIn had disallowed this saying that the startup violated the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by scraping this data from the platform.

The judge thought otherwise, however.

hiQ Labs is the startup in question and the judge ruled in their favor saying that LinkedIn was leveraging its power in the professional market and was doing an uncompetitive practice by disallowing this.

It has to be mentioned that LinkedIn has more than 400 million members and 2 million paid subscribers which amount to a treasure of data. One of the reasons Microsoft acquired the platform. They were ultimately disappointed by the ruling and promised that the case wasn't over, they will continue to protect the data which users make available on the platform.

Source