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.