LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data
A California federal judge finalized a consent judgment barring ProAPIs and Netswift from mass-scraping LinkedIn via millions of fake accounts.
A California federal judge finalized an agreement between LinkedIn, ProAPIs, and Netswift requiring the firms to stop large-scale scraping, stop selling and transferring scraped data, stop accessing LinkedIn via fake accounts, and delete collected data. LinkedIn's October lawsuit alleged the companies operated a network of millions of bogus accounts harvesting member, company, and school data plus reactions, comments, and posts. LinkedIn said it typically blocked fake accounts within hours, but the firms allegedly created hundreds to thousands of new accounts daily, making blocking ineffective. The ruling follows another LinkedIn scraping-related legal win roughly five months earlier.
- Consent judgment requires firms to stop scraping and delete collected LinkedIn data
- Millions of fake accounts allegedly harvested profiles, posts, and reactions
- Firms reportedly created hundreds to thousands of new accounts daily
- Second scraping-related legal win for LinkedIn in about five months
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A California federal judge on Thursday finalized a deal between LinkedIn and two software companies that requires the firms to stop scraping user data on a mass scale. The agreement between LinkedIn, ProAPIs and joint business operator Netswift also requires the firms to stop selling and transferring the data, no longer access LinkedIn through fake accounts and delete the data that was scraped, according to a senior LinkedIn executive. Sarah Wright, who oversees litigation and enforcement for the tech giant, called the outcome an important triumph in a Thursday LinkedIn post. “Your profile is yours,” Wright said. “What you choose to share on LinkedIn is meant for the professional community you're building, not for an outside company to scrape and use in ways you never agreed to.” LinkedIn sued the companies and their CEO last October, alleging in its complaint that the firms created a massive network of bogus accounts — numbering in the millions — that scraped the data on a constant basis. The targeted data included member, company and school information alongside member reactions, comments and posts. The social media giant routinely found and blocked the phony accounts mere hours after they were created, the complaint said, but even in that short window the companies could scrape hundreds of profiles. The software firms allegedly set up hundreds or even thousands of new accounts daily, the complaint said, making it impossible for LinkedIn to stop the scraping. ProAPIs, which calls itself a “data pipeline platform,” posted a comment about the settlement on its website, saying it “does not offer tools to scrape LinkedIn.” “ProAPIs has agreed to a consent judgment in United States federal court that it will cease scraping LinkedIn and will never scrape LinkedIn in the future,” the post said. Data scraping of user profiles has been a longtime problem for the social platform. Five months ago, Wright celebrated a legal win against another firm that was allegedly distributing a browser extension used to scrape users’ data without their consent, according to a LinkedIn post at the time.
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Suzanne Smalley
is a reporter covering digital privacy, surveillance technologies and cybersecurity policy for The Record. She was previously a cybersecurity reporter at CyberScoop. Earlier in her career Suzanne covered the Boston Police Department for the Boston Globe and two presidential campaign cycles for Newsweek. She lives in Washington with her husband and three children.