6 ms·
LinkedIn sues software company allegedly scraping data from profiles
- animitronix 1y agoSo are they gonna go after pitchbook and crunchbase too or nah?
- saltyoldman 1y agoThey're owned by Microsoft and poorly managed. Hundreds of people get locked out daily and can no longer access or change their OWN data. I say, let the scrapers take them down. We need to stop the walled in gardens of data these companies DONT own - it's the user's data.
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- SilverElfin 1y agoI don’t get why LinkedIn should be gatekeeping this data that it doesn’t create. It’s bad for society.
- motoxpro 1y agoI think most users don't want their data to be used by anyone and everyone. I sure don't. If one user needs access to their own data, they can always export it and take it where they please. For most people the dangers of openness (see Cambridge Analytica), the lack of upside and the lack of security in small players mean that walled gardens are the best solution for the majority of people. This lawsuit is exactly why people trust walled gardens to keep their data walled off. Because I trusted LinkedIn, not ProAPI and whatever malicious actors they sell to.
- neilv 1y ago> This lawsuit is exactly why people trust walled gardens to keep their data walled off. Because I trusted LinkedIn, not [...] Obviously LinkedIn is also in the business of selling the data about you, and also access to you. LinkedIn just doesn't like this other company leeching off that data LinkedIn got about you, and then competing with LinkedIn in making money off that data (including access).
- LamaOfRuin 1y agoBut linkedin is doing so in accordance with the legal agreement you have with them, which I am able to exit at any time and instruct them to remove my data. I can't do this for every company that illegally (in many jurisdictions) hordes information about me.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoYou're currently on one of the very few sites with no delete/edit button for your own content (after a short initial period.) It's the only site I can think of that hoards my data like that. Which is why I only post anonymous throwaway content here.
- motoxpro 1y agoSelling data inside their walled garden in a way I am OK with in exchange for a free service. Not a 3rd party selling my information to a scam farm in a foreign land that has no laws that will use all of that information to extract money from my parents.
- MangoToupe 1y agoI don't even trust LinkedIn, but it's not like I can sue them for offering antisocial terms, let alone force them to a negotiation table. It's just a shitty situation all around. At the very least they should pay me to use the site if they're making money off of it.
- motoxpro 1y agoIf everyone has access to your data it becomes even more worthless and you will definitely not get aid for it. At least now I can keep it somewhere and they can use it to fund engineers to keep the service up, lawyers to make sure your data stays safe, etc. You are free to leave and delete your data, unlike if everyone has access to it then it is out there in perpetuity. You definitely can't sue a data broker to pay you/stop using your data.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- singlepaynews 1y agoI sure do! If LinkedIn can't market my resume to open roles then letting recruiters roll their own scrapers against it is the next best thing. I understand that LI owns my data, I just wish they were effective in using it! (edit: "my" data, as in the data I post there.)
- motoxpro 1y agoI guess that was my point, YOU are free to export your data and post it on the internet, but don't make everyone (me) do the same.
- singlepaynews 1y agoI don't see how I (or LinkedIn) is making you do anything? LinkedIn is a place I can post data. I choose to do so in an attempt to market my resume. I fully expect that the data I post on LinkedIn's server becomes and is the property of LinkedIn, and wish it was more effective at extracting value from it? Because LinkedIn is less effective than I'd like, I support 3rd parties scraping the data I posted there, again on the hope that they'd be more successful at marketing that data, which I would benefit from as the data is my resume.
- motoxpro 1y agoWe're in agreement. I was just saying I don't support 3rd parties scraping my data so as they just get yours and not mine then have at it!
- reorder9695 1y agoI think trusting data you post publicly to only remain exactly where you publish it is naive at best. I think it's much more sensible to think that as soon as you put something public, it will exist somewhere forever, and it's foolish to believe otherwise.
- brailsafe 1y agoThey also make it difficult to destroy. Try deleting your post or comment history, and you can only do it slowly one by one, with only a few sketchy tools for making it faster that go against their terms of service.
- SilverElfin 1y agoOther social media do it too. At best you can only delete your entire account.
- iamleppert 1y agoHave ChatGPT code up a script for you, that you can paste into developer tools. It's how I deleted all my content from there.
- cwnyth 1y agoCompared to HN, which doesn't allow for any comments to be deleted?
- type0 1y agoHN doesn't require you to give out your name and email
- ares623 1y agoCan the company just claim it’s for AI training and it’s fair use?
- ashu1461 1y agoIt has started to backfire. Claude also had to a pay almost 1.5b for illegally training / scrapping. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/business/anthropic-ai-settlement-authors-claude https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/business/anthropic-ai-settlem...
- woodrowbarlow 1y agoanthropic was _not_ sued for including data scraped from public websites. they were sued for including data extracted from pirated books.
- teachrdan 1y agoIIUC that was for illegally downloading ebooks and other media -- it had nothing to do with training per se. Scraping publicly accessible data is generally legal, although Microsoft/LinkedIn clearly think they have enough of a leg to stand on to at least litigate this.
- sfifs 1y agoNot an expert but there was a court ruling in the US I think last year where circumventing login protection through bot operated accounts when the login is intended for human use was ruled as violation of CFAA. The current state of litigation in the US seems to be that scraping public facing data/websites has been considered as permissible by the courts but data behind a login intended for humans is not. I think there's still a split between the circuits, so this will go through some years of appeal yet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anfilt 1y agoI hope linkedIn looses.
- nextworddev 1y agoA bunch of GTM and Sales APIs recently stopped offering their LinkedIn APis. Seems like the lawsuits are working to scare them off. Prediction: this will be a very much pay to play market
- Poomba 1y agoExamples?
- Poomba 1y agoWhy are they going after the small fish? If they really want to put a dent into this, go after the biggest players scraping LinkedIn: PeopleDataLabs and Apollo.io (and no, taking down their company page does not count)
- deadbabe 1y agoGo after small fish that no one cares about first to normalize the activity, then move up to bigger and bigger targets until you become inevitable.
- el_benhameen 1y agoOr, go after the small fish who can’t afford to have a biglaw team on retainer, bulldoze them to get a legal precedent set, and then use the example to extract concessions from the bigger players.
- Goofy_Coyote 1y agoBecause they either have side deals with the big names, or they want to set precedent for going after them. Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here, but my bet is on having a deal with the big players, we allow you to scrape us (or we give you a pipe you can consume out of), and you pay us in monetary or non-monetary terms; like how many business exchanges work
- 1y ago
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoYeah, only Microsoft is allowed to indiscriminately scrape the web! I somehow want both parties to lose.
- hbn 1y agoLinkedIn is the only website on the internet I want scraped so I can view it without it sending a notification to every person whose profile I look at
- MisterSandman 1y agoYou can turn on Private Browsing, even on a free account. It also prevents YOU from seeing who viewed you, though, unless you buy premium.
- mtlynch 1y agoThis happened before in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn.[0] I've heard a lot of people cite this case as proof that scraping is legal, but it seems like the decision kept going back and forth in appeals, and I never understood what precedent it set, if any, around the legality of scraping. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
- sorum 1y agoThis one seems different from the (correct) ruling in favor in hiQ Labs, where the courts were quite clear that scraping the public Internet was completely legal. This is a case of a company creating millions of fake user accounts, so they’re behind the login wall and not on the public side of the Internet anymore. At least, that’s how I’m reading this.
- xyst 1y agobasically, linkedin is just pissed off they weren't getting a cut of the profits this small company made on linkedins (already public?) data. The winners here are the law firms on both the plaintiff and defendant sides. Drag this through the court system for as long as possible. PR. PR. PR. Then settle out of court for an "undisclosed amount." This is the mafia equivalent of "sending a message" in corporate land. Yawn.
- kanodiaayush 1y ago[dead]
- atonse 1y agoI'm old enough to remember when pretty much every single social media company had really nice APIs so third party clients could be built. Oh man, a lot of the web really feels very enshittified these days.
- tracker1 1y agoThe company that put an Email proxy on people's phones to scrape all email going in and out has a complaint about scraping?
- pona-a 1y agoI haven't heard of it and I couldn't find the story by these keywords. Can you tell me more? I'm genuinely interested.
- tracker1 1y agohttps://marco.org/2013/10/25/linkedin-intro-insecurity https://marco.org/2013/10/25/linkedin-intro-insecurity I don't recall all of the specific details, but I just remember reading about it at the time and how they bypassed some of iOS security protections to do it. Adn that they didn't get perma-banned from the various app stores back then is beyond me. It's a huge part of why I avoid installing apps on my phone in general.
- openmosix 1y agohttps://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing-impossible-ios https://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing...
- openmosix 1y agoA product called "Linkedin Intro" that was killed within 6 months due to backlash and significant security flaws. It was somehow creating a reverse imap proxy to intercept your email traffic, and "decorate" emails with someone's linkedin profile. It was ~12 years ago, so there's not much left around, but here is an engineering blog post from Linkedin talking about how they architected it https://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing-impossible-ios https://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing...
- callc 1y agoWhoa, really? That is diabolical. Can you provide more info?
- johnnienaked 1y agoOnly a linkedin executive could consider user submitted personal information to be "their" data
- dylan604 1y agoThey are responsible for it. If people are gaining access to that data in ways other than what the users were led to believe, it is LI's problem
- johnnienaked 1y agoCan't you gain access simply by making a free account?
- dylan604 1y agoNot sure your point, because of course you can. But when you make that account you agree to terms. Those terms do not permit you to take the data presented to be stored in your own database to monetize on your end. Make your own website to collect data. You’re being obtuse about this. Is it deliberate?
- johnnienaked 1y agoThis is just gatekeeping as a business model, and it's a bad one.
- ozim 1y agoWell maybe I can get that company to backup my LinkedIn posts because it is utterly broken to download anything about my profile to make a backup. There is an API option but endpoints from documentation just return 404. There is Data Privacy "download my data" I wanted really data like my posts, photos not crappy CSV having basic properties. In the end there is "View the rich media" but also I have to click one by one and there is no text for posts on the images - I can do that going one by one of my posts and copy pasting. It sucks despite "your data belongs to you" texts on the labels.
- phoronixrly 1y agoBack up your linkedin posts? What valuable information was ever contained in a linkedin post?
- ozim 1y agoThese are my posts I have personal attachment to what I wrote. Most of what I wrote I have in my notes anyway — but still if they say it is my data and I can always download it, I really want to download it and not like that someone just puts up lies on their website like "data is yours you can always download it".
- subscribed 1y agoLOL, what sort of snarky and patronising response is this? All the response was in the comment you try to ridicule.
- nathan_compton 1y agoIf I had the Infinity Gems but I could only use them once, I would strongly consider snapping LinkedIn out of existence.
- dylan604 1y agoplease, go bigger and do all social media types
- repeek 1y agoCurious if Dex (YC 19) (getdex.com) is at risk — their LinkedIn integration requires a chrome extension to scrape data rather than LinkedIn APIs.
- myzie 1y agoThe Chrome extension approach may shift some (most?) of the risk to the end user, since technically they are now the one scraping. Theoretically getdex would be relatively better off in this arrangement, while putting their customers into a legal gray area.
- Simulacra 1y agoOh dear, my office has been scraping LinkedIn forever. We use it to make visual networks of contacts in our industry, and relate that to whom we have working for the company. oops.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoComplaint https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.457309/gov.uscourts.cand.457309.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...
- myzie 1y agoRelated research on past litigation in this area for anyone that wants to go deeper: https://deepnoodle.ai/research/linkedin-legal-battles-tos-violations https://deepnoodle.ai/research/linkedin-legal-battles-tos-vi...
- polishdude20 1y agoOn that note, I've noticed an uptick in past coworkers as Facebook recommended friends. How does it know about these people I've worked with?
- BenGosub 1y agoThere are already many companies offering bots creation for social media, they might not sell the data, but they do sell the bots.
- _imnothere 1y agoSo tired of their auth wall, screw 'em.
- realaaa 1y agothey could have instead try to understand what are they missing (what / how is driving that scraping demand?) - and maybe try to do that themselves or partner up to amplify that other use case but I guess we are in the lawyers divide and conquer mentality these days