4 ms·
2 questions I asked myself after reading this: 1) Do I side with LinkedIn or HiQ? 2) What case law precedent do I think we ought to set? I’m personally confl
by cj 5y ago
2 questions I asked myself after reading this:
1) Do I side with LinkedIn or HiQ?
2) What case law precedent do I think we ought to set?
I’m personally conflicted on which way to lean. I see pros and cons to both - this is an interesting case.
- wslack 5y agoScraping for non-profit purposes feels fine. Scraping for commercial purposes feels dirty. I don't know if there's a way for the law to square that circle.
- postalrat 5y agoHow about a browser extension that scrapes only the the profile you are visiting and adds that information to an ATS. Just to prevent a lot of copy paste.
- fncypants 5y agoIf what you are feeling is that scraping for commercial purposes feels "unfair," that is because if it is not allowed it traditionally falls within a legal cause of action commonly called "unfair competition." In the same vein as trade secret theft. So the law does square that circle, but the line drawn is a fuzzy gray one. Its unfair to free ride off a competitor, but yet some kinds of actions that look like free riding are in fact allowed.
- jrochkind1 5y agoWhen Google does it, it's commercial, right? Should you need a license from all indexed content to make a search engine? Isn't indexing for search what HiQ is doing too?
- cwkoss 5y agoI feel strongly that non-commercial scraping should be protected. I think commercial scraping should probably be allowed, but there should be some sort of mandatory maximum retention limit, so deleted (or updated access controls on) content eventually ages out (or gets transferred to a non-commercial custodian for archival purposes).
- username90 5y agoI don't see why linkedin should be allowed to monetize it if other companies aren't. If they just monetized the website via ads it would be fine, but since they sell your aggregated data to people I don't see why other data brokers shouldn't be able to also sell your publicly available data. Linkedin as a data broker and linkedin as a website are two unrelated businesses, and extending dominance in one to the other is cause for anti competitive action from the government, HiQ already won in lower courts which is why this has gone this far.
- cwkoss 5y agoWell I'd like to see some regulation on commercial data brokers too. I think individuals should have the right to know whether they are in datasets and the right to be deleted from that dataset upon request if they never gave direct consent to the entity holding their data. It seems extreme from where we are now, but maybe data brokers should be required to notify people when they're added to a dataset without direct consent, including instructions on how to be removed if they don't want to be included.