hiQ is a company that «scrapes» public profiles from LinkedIn to package them for employers. This has drawn the Microsoft-owned company’s ire. LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist and got sued in return.
LinkedIn and HiQ are embroiled in a legal battle that might decide the future of web scraping. The concept of data scraping from websites is a controversial one and the law that governs it is, unsurprisingly, contentious too.
hiQ scrapes data of thousands of employees from the public profiles on LinkedIn. Then, they apply data science to the compiled records, which is sold to the companies to retain/hire good employees. This, according to the Microsoft-owned company, is «against the law». The company sent a cease-and-desist letter to the «People Analytics» company which, in turn, decided to sue.
Mark Weidick, CEO of hiQ wrote of LinkedIn’s actions:
However, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or the CFAA, which governs these cases might be on LinkedIn’s side. The law makes it a crime to «access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access». A precedent was set when Facebook won a similar case against Power Ventures. The social networking giant won the case when the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found the online information services company guilty of infringing on Facebook’s data even after the permissions were «rescinded».
This brings up an important question regarding the extent of access to public profiles on websites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and what it means for the future of the internet sector. Also, how long can the CFAA, a law created in 1986, guide cases such as these?
Source: Ars Technica
