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

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

LinkedIn has won a lawsuit against hiQ Labs (hiQ) for data scraping. The lawsuit proceeded before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The decision was published on November 4th, 2022.

Data scraping is a technique where companies use a computer program to extract data from websites or other public databases on the internet, with the objective of processing those data and reuse it for their own purpose.

Judge Edward Chen writes in his decision that “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.”

The Judge ruled against ihQ stating that “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.”

The VP Legal of LinkedIn, Sarah Wight, states at her LinkedIn’s profile that the Court’s ruling helps LinkedIn to better protect everyone in their professional community from unauthorized use of profile data, and it establishes important precedent to stop this kind of abuse in the future.

This is not the first legal case that LinkedIn wins related to data scraping. Earlier this year, LinkedIn has successfully resolved a lawsuit against the Singapore-based company Mantheos. As part of the settle, Mantheos agreed to permanently delete all scraped LinkedIn member profile data.

Access to decision here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.312704/gov.uscourts.cand.312704.404.0.pdf