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LinkedIn emerged victorious in a nearly six-year-old lawsuit against hiQ Labs for data scraping.
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.”
LinkedIn also ended up on the winning side of a similar data-scraping lawsuit against Singapore-based company Mantheos and its founders earlier this year.
Head of litigation Sarah Wight said in a statement, “Today in the hiQ legal proceeding, the court announced a significant win for LinkedIn and our members against personal data scraping, among other platform abuses. The court ruled that LinkedIn’s user agreement clearly prohibits scraping of member profile data and the use of fake accounts, affirming LinkedIn’s legal positions against hiQ for the past six years. The court also found that hiQ knew for years that its actions violated our user agreement, and that LinkedIn is entitled to move forward with its claim that hiQ violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”
She added, “The court’s ruling helps us better protect everyone in our professional community from unauthorized use of profile data, and it establishes important precedent to stop this kind of abuse in the future. We will continue to fight on behalf of our members to stop illegal scraping. From taking legal action against unauthorized scraping to making significant investments in technical defenses, we are committed to keeping the control of data where it belongs—with our members.”
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