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Not sure how to feel about this. While in theory, scraping data is a shady practice - companies like LinkedIn leave the door open for it.
How is scraping data shady? Is it also shady to walk into a store and look at things without buying anything?
Not making a claim about scraping, but it's maybe more apt to compare to walking into a store and writing a list of everything for sale their costs.
A few weeks ago I was looking up public profiles on LinkedIn and I noticed what I interpreted to be some network-side fingerprinting of some kind. The first couple profiles came up, but from that point I was only served a sign up page. It didn't matter if I changed browsers or spawned new incognito sessions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CFAA, which makes it a crime to access a computer system without proper permission.
Providing the information on a publicly accessible page provides permission. It's like posting a letter on a public noticeboard and demanding that certain people not read it. If you don't want it read, take it down.
Ah, complaining when people look at the painting in your store front gallery on 5th avenue because you have to pay for the upkeep of the sidewalk.
LinkedIn and Reid Hoffman have stories (don't know Reid personally) that I don't buy as one of the first LinkedIn users, premium, ads, and rejected API customer. I think LinkedIn is a scam, where the service is done for the recruiters and job postings while they make you believe they are thinking in you. They never work for an OkCupid or FB like services but for businesses except adding basic introduction messaging.
Everyone knows that LinkedIn gets paid by recruiters rather than recruitees. But of course, that is perfectly fine. People are happy to be the product if it results in job leads.
Between bot-nets, mechanical turks, deep learning, data brokering, lack of globally-enforced privacy laws that require divulging of sourced personal data, etc., I can't see a way for LinkedIn to prevent others from scraping and gaining from their publicly- and user-accessible data. They'll drive it underground, but if the concern is preventing others from grabbing the data at all, versus performance management, they'll still leak like a sieve.
If you post it on a public network, it is defacto, public. If you don't want it scraped, take it down, or put it behind a login. If the user provides the login to a scraper, then the scraper has permission.
If I can walk near a pool, should I also be able to run? Is running anything more than faster walking? If I'm allowed to be around the pool walking with my entry ID, should I also be allowed to place my ID on a little motorized car and make it dart around the pool really fast? Should I be able to duplicate my badge, put it on a bunch of little cars and direct them to quickly get all the floaties before anyone else? How about giving them all their own fake IDs? Now all the same questions, except there is a sign that explicitly prohibits all of these examples except for walking.
It seems disingenuous to argue that the automation and rapid increase of a thing should be allowed just because a thing is allowed. That doesn't typically match our intuitive notions of ethics in other parts of society, like driving or walking around a pool. Yes, you can walk around a pool as much as you want, but if you change to running then you have fundamentally altered your behavior through increased capability, not merely done "more of walking" to utilize more of your freedom.
I suppose a natural counterargument to this analogy might be that running around pools is unsafe, and scraping is not unsafe in the same way. But my point here is establishing that a behavior intrinsically changes into a different behavior if you increase the speed at which you're doing it or the capability at which you can do it.
If you post it on a public network, it is defacto, public. If you don't want it scraped, take it down, or put it behind a login. If the user provides the login to a scraper, then the scraper has permission.
Even if you go for "forgiveness rather than permission", if you ride it a second time after I've told you I don't want you riding it, then you're in the wrong.
Obviously, there are philosophical arguments to be made about the status of information online, but if the information were provided to LinkedIn, to be used on LinkedIn properties, I as a user would take umbrage with it being taken by a 3rd party, even if it were viewable publicly.