6 ms·

LinkedIn takes plenty of technical precautions to block scraping. I’ve built bots that scrape them in the past, it’s surprisingly difficult as LinkedIn is very

LinkedIn takes plenty of technical precautions to block scraping. I’ve built bots that scrape them in the past, it’s surprisingly difficult as LinkedIn is very good at determining you’re a bot and blocking you. So it’s hard to argue that a service which is scraping LinkedIn is doing it without knowledge that they are going against LinkedIn’s wishes. Whether or not this is illegal is up to the courts to determine, and I really hope they decide it is fine (although I have zero faith that’s how the ruling will come down). That being said, I hate LinkedIn as a company and I fully support anyone trying to mess with them. They are not a social network, they are a sleazy website that convinces people to willingly provide personal information which they then turn around and sell at ridiculously high prices. Even if you are legitimately using LinkedIn as an end-user, it’s easy to get blocked for using it too much and being forced to pay just to interact with people on the site.

DeusExMachina 9y ago
* That being said, I hate LinkedIn as a company and I fully support anyone trying to mess with them So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? * convinces people to willingly provide personal information Convincing is not forcing, and in fact, you say "willingly" yourself. Any business convinces you to willingly give them money or other value. * sell at ridiculously high prices To respect to what? Prices are determined by the market. We are not talking about a life-saving medicine or health care, on which there could be some debate. We are talking about a company selling information, which has value and which it acquires through an infrastructure that takes a lot of money to run. Value that customers are willing to pay for. * Even if you are legitimately using LinkedIn as an end-user, it’s easy to get blocked For what definition of legitimately? Yours? Since it's their business, they can define what is a legitimate free use and what can be a paid one. * They are not a social network So based on what I pointed out, they are not a social network only because they are not free? Do all social network have to be free and give your data for advertisers to be social networks?
- leksak 9y ago
  This might be one of the best replies on HN that I have seen. Spot on.
- vkou 9y ago
  > So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? If it's not illegal, then scummy behaviour against a scummy company doesn't exactly set my moral compass off. You reap what you sow.
  - komali2 9y ago
    >moral compass The issue I see with this is in 2 part. First, any issue that comes down to "moral compass" is inherently dangerous. We can find many examples of the simple concept that what to one person is Good is to another Evil. In this case, I think Linkedin shareholders would not appreciate calls to mess with the site, or with people having trouble jobhunting because the site is going down repeatedly due to DDOS or whatever. The second is that these kinds of calls to action (linkedin sucks, fuck with it) smell like vigilantism to me, and while Batman is my favorite hero (I really only lift because I kinda sorta wanna be batman), vigilantism doesn't contribute to a stable society. Rule of law works better than the chaos of multiple agents enforcing their own moral code as law. EDIT: I'm happy to be downvoted if I'm saying something stupid, but while doing so I would very much appreciate a quick comment as to why I'm wrong so I can improve my knowledge.
    - sprafa 9y ago
      everything comes down to a moral compass of some kind. Your comment expects some sort of objective measurement of good and evil, but I don't see any. The law can be, and is often, in the wrong. Most people seem to think this law (if it is held up in court) is wrong and should be changed. You might say, oh well, we have a democratic right to change or influence our laws. But a princeton study has found no correlation between public preferences of the majority of the population and enacted policy: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... From memory, the only thing that leads populations to revolt against their government is high enough food prices. Outside of that, revolts almost never happen. What I'm trying to say is A) unjust, monopolistic, or excessive laws are probably more normal than the opposite because B) the idea that democracy means people have some weigh in lawmaking might be a myth and C) most people don't do anything about it because they only act when the very basics of their livelihood are threatened. Your view, that some unjust or excessive laws are preferable to total chaos, seems to carry the assumption that laws are naturally benign and/or made to serve some purpose for society, therefore we should not challenge them without good reasons to do so. If the opposite is true and most laws or a high enough number of them are not just, then the fact that the vast majority of people disagrees with them is only natural. This is a fairly long-winded way of saying that most people would say you're being downvoted because there are plenty of terrible laws that we should not acquiesce to silently.
- crazypyro 9y ago
  >So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? The previous commenter never mentioned messing with them illegally and disagrees with the analysis that this scraping is illegal. He said he hopes the courts do not rule this is illegal. Pretty disingenuous to start a reply like that... Many of your other points are not really giving the previous commenter any charity at all. For example, >For what definition of legitimately? Yours? Since it's their business, they can define what is a legitimate free use and what can be a paid one. He was literally trying to provide an example of where their scraping protections can be appear to be overzealous to casual users, not arguing whether those users are legitimate or not. What is the premise of your argument? To me, it seems you are simply trying to defend LinkedIn's business practices and legal pursuits, rather than discussing anything about the legality of scraping or the specifics of LinkedIn's anti-scraping implementations.
- brailsafe 9y ago
  I would replace the word "convinces" with "deceives". If you deceive a person into, for example, giving them access and permission to use your personal contact list however they please, then proceed to do just that, you don't have anything to complain about.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    Agree. The number of times I've received LinkedIn emails from people I no longer speak to who I'm confident would have no actual inclination to connect with me is certainly in the double digits. They've all been conned into giving LinkedIn their email password, and LinkedIn is going crazy as result. This probably happened a lot more a few years ago. Is perhaps 2FA making this harder these days?
    - ufmace 9y ago
      Are they still doing that? I haven't seen a request from LinkedIn for email access credentials in a while. Still a pretty sketchy thing to do IMO. I wonder if Google, Yahoo, MS etc have done anything like watch for requests from LinkedIn with correct credentials, block them, and reset the user's password and give them a warning that they just gave their account password to a third party and this is a Very Bad Idea.
      - darioush 9y ago
        A whole bunch of other sites ask for your Google, etc credentials instead of using the SSO API. I've even seen some tax software ask for your Bank login. It's really a bad practice but LinkedIn isn't the worst offender.
        ufmace 9y ago
        Speaking of offenders, I just noticed that the seemingly popular Venmo payments app asks for the web login credentials to any bank you try to link it to. Hell no I'm not giving some random app login credentials to any of my bank accounts.
lgas 9y ago
> So it’s hard to argue that a service which is scraping LinkedIn is doing it without knowledge that they are going against LinkedIn’s wishes. As far as I can tell, no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it. I think it all pretty much boils down to this quote from the article: > LinkedIn's position disturbs Orin Kerr, a legal scholar at George Washington University. "You can't publish to the world and then say 'no, you can't look at it,'" Kerr told Ars.
- betenoire 9y ago
  > no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it. The title is "It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission". So that argument is implied in the headline, at least. As for Orin Kerr, I'm sure he'd agree that there are private parts of the internet (my payment information being an obvious example). Just because something is deployed to the internet doesn't mean it is "published to the world" as he claims.
  - derefr 9y ago
    "Published to the world" is a bit off; I'd compare it more to recording telephone conversations with corporations' public service numbers. They always tell you that you are being recorded (for "training and quality purposes") so they give up their right to not be recorded in turn. If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal?
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      >If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal? I sure hope not. From there it doesn't seem to far off to claim that "He was really only ever showing up for work to learn some skills and how he's using those skills to run his own business!" sort of lawsuits. If you compile difficult to find but freely available information into a more easy to digest format I see that as virtually always a net positive.
jonbarker 9y ago
Don't the other social networks throttle http requests from certain dubious ip addresses? I think they all do this.
vertex-four 9y ago
> a sleazy website that convinces people to willingly provide personal information which they then turn around and sell at ridiculously high prices I think you just defined a social network, unfortunately.

DeusExMachina 9y ago

* That being said, I hate LinkedIn as a company and I fully support anyone trying to mess with them So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? * convinces people to willingly provide personal information Convincing is not forcing, and in fact, you say "willingly" yourself. Any business convinces you to willingly give them money or other value. * sell at ridiculously high prices To respect to what? Prices are determined by the market. We are not talking about a life-saving medicine or health care, on which there could be some debate. We are talking about a company selling information, which has value and which it acquires through an infrastructure that takes a lot of money to run. Value that customers are willing to pay for. * Even if you are legitimately using LinkedIn as an end-user, it’s easy to get blocked For what definition of legitimately? Yours? Since it's their business, they can define what is a legitimate free use and what can be a paid one. * They are not a social network So based on what I pointed out, they are not a social network only because they are not free? Do all social network have to be free and give your data for advertisers to be social networks?

leksak 9y ago
This might be one of the best replies on HN that I have seen. Spot on.
vkou 9y ago
> So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? If it's not illegal, then scummy behaviour against a scummy company doesn't exactly set my moral compass off. You reap what you sow.
- komali2 9y ago
  >moral compass The issue I see with this is in 2 part. First, any issue that comes down to "moral compass" is inherently dangerous. We can find many examples of the simple concept that what to one person is Good is to another Evil. In this case, I think Linkedin shareholders would not appreciate calls to mess with the site, or with people having trouble jobhunting because the site is going down repeatedly due to DDOS or whatever. The second is that these kinds of calls to action (linkedin sucks, fuck with it) smell like vigilantism to me, and while Batman is my favorite hero (I really only lift because I kinda sorta wanna be batman), vigilantism doesn't contribute to a stable society. Rule of law works better than the chaos of multiple agents enforcing their own moral code as law. EDIT: I'm happy to be downvoted if I'm saying something stupid, but while doing so I would very much appreciate a quick comment as to why I'm wrong so I can improve my knowledge.
  - sprafa 9y ago
    everything comes down to a moral compass of some kind. Your comment expects some sort of objective measurement of good and evil, but I don't see any. The law can be, and is often, in the wrong. Most people seem to think this law (if it is held up in court) is wrong and should be changed. You might say, oh well, we have a democratic right to change or influence our laws. But a princeton study has found no correlation between public preferences of the majority of the population and enacted policy: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... From memory, the only thing that leads populations to revolt against their government is high enough food prices. Outside of that, revolts almost never happen. What I'm trying to say is A) unjust, monopolistic, or excessive laws are probably more normal than the opposite because B) the idea that democracy means people have some weigh in lawmaking might be a myth and C) most people don't do anything about it because they only act when the very basics of their livelihood are threatened. Your view, that some unjust or excessive laws are preferable to total chaos, seems to carry the assumption that laws are naturally benign and/or made to serve some purpose for society, therefore we should not challenge them without good reasons to do so. If the opposite is true and most laws or a high enough number of them are not just, then the fact that the vast majority of people disagrees with them is only natural. This is a fairly long-winded way of saying that most people would say you're being downvoted because there are plenty of terrible laws that we should not acquiesce to silently.
crazypyro 9y ago
>So it's fine to mess with them, even illegally, just because you don't like them? The previous commenter never mentioned messing with them illegally and disagrees with the analysis that this scraping is illegal. He said he hopes the courts do not rule this is illegal. Pretty disingenuous to start a reply like that... Many of your other points are not really giving the previous commenter any charity at all. For example, >For what definition of legitimately? Yours? Since it's their business, they can define what is a legitimate free use and what can be a paid one. He was literally trying to provide an example of where their scraping protections can be appear to be overzealous to casual users, not arguing whether those users are legitimate or not. What is the premise of your argument? To me, it seems you are simply trying to defend LinkedIn's business practices and legal pursuits, rather than discussing anything about the legality of scraping or the specifics of LinkedIn's anti-scraping implementations.
brailsafe 9y ago
I would replace the word "convinces" with "deceives". If you deceive a person into, for example, giving them access and permission to use your personal contact list however they please, then proceed to do just that, you don't have anything to complain about.
- sundvor 9y ago
  Agree. The number of times I've received LinkedIn emails from people I no longer speak to who I'm confident would have no actual inclination to connect with me is certainly in the double digits. They've all been conned into giving LinkedIn their email password, and LinkedIn is going crazy as result. This probably happened a lot more a few years ago. Is perhaps 2FA making this harder these days?
  - ufmace 9y ago
    Are they still doing that? I haven't seen a request from LinkedIn for email access credentials in a while. Still a pretty sketchy thing to do IMO. I wonder if Google, Yahoo, MS etc have done anything like watch for requests from LinkedIn with correct credentials, block them, and reset the user's password and give them a warning that they just gave their account password to a third party and this is a Very Bad Idea.
    - darioush 9y ago
      A whole bunch of other sites ask for your Google, etc credentials instead of using the SSO API. I've even seen some tax software ask for your Bank login. It's really a bad practice but LinkedIn isn't the worst offender.
      - ufmace 9y ago
        Speaking of offenders, I just noticed that the seemingly popular Venmo payments app asks for the web login credentials to any bank you try to link it to. Hell no I'm not giving some random app login credentials to any of my bank accounts.

lgas 9y ago

> So it’s hard to argue that a service which is scraping LinkedIn is doing it without knowledge that they are going against LinkedIn’s wishes. As far as I can tell, no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it. I think it all pretty much boils down to this quote from the article: > LinkedIn's position disturbs Orin Kerr, a legal scholar at George Washington University. "You can't publish to the world and then say 'no, you can't look at it,'" Kerr told Ars.

betenoire 9y ago
> no one has made that argument, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to rebut it. The title is "It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission". So that argument is implied in the headline, at least. As for Orin Kerr, I'm sure he'd agree that there are private parts of the internet (my payment information being an obvious example). Just because something is deployed to the internet doesn't mean it is "published to the world" as he claims.
- derefr 9y ago
  "Published to the world" is a bit off; I'd compare it more to recording telephone conversations with corporations' public service numbers. They always tell you that you are being recorded (for "training and quality purposes") so they give up their right to not be recorded in turn. If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal?
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    >If a company paid a million people to call into an information service hotline and each request one fact from it—and then the company recorded and compiled the answers into their own database to start their own information service—is that illegal? I sure hope not. From there it doesn't seem to far off to claim that "He was really only ever showing up for work to learn some skills and how he's using those skills to run his own business!" sort of lawsuits. If you compile difficult to find but freely available information into a more easy to digest format I see that as virtually always a net positive.

jonbarker 9y ago

Don't the other social networks throttle http requests from certain dubious ip addresses? I think they all do this.

vertex-four 9y ago

> a sleazy website that convinces people to willingly provide personal information which they then turn around and sell at ridiculously high prices I think you just defined a social network, unfortunately.