Court Sides With LinkedIn in Data Scraping Lawsuit vs. hiQ Labs

LinkedIn emerged victorious in a nearly six-year-old lawsuit against hiQ Labs for data scraping. From a report: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the professional network, with Judge Edward Chen writing, "hiQ relied on LinkedIn for its data primarily by scraping wholly public LinkedIn profiles using automated software. hiQ had continuously attempted to circumvent LinkedIn's general technical defenses since May 2014. "It experimented and attempted to reverse engineer LinkedIn's systems and to avoid detection by simulating human site-access behaviors. hiQ also hired independent contractors known as 'turkers' to conduct quality assurance while 'logged-in' to LinkedIn by viewing and confirming hiQ customers' employees' identities manually." hiQ Labs wound down its operations in 2018, although its servers continued running into 2019 to deliver on client contracts. Chen wrote, "In sum, hiQ breached LinkedIn's user agreement both through its own scraping of LinkedIn's site and using scraped data, and through turkers' creation of false identities on LinkedIn's platform."

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