The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruling is the latest chapter in a long-running battle between workforce analytics startup HiQ Labs and LinkedIn. The employment-focused social network…
What just happened? A US appeals court has reaffirmed an earlier ruling that states companies or individuals who scrape publicly accessible data from the web aren’t breaking the law. The result contradicts Microsoft-owned LinkedIn’s claim that web scraping is illegal and a threat to user privacy. The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruling is the latest chapter in a long-running battle between workforce analytics startup HiQ Labs and LinkedIn. The employment-focused social network sent HiQ Labs a cease and desist letter in 2017 demanding that it stop scraping its members’ public profile data; something it did approximately every two weeks as part of a service offered to businesses looking to “determine skills gaps or turnover risks months ahead of time.
