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U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#61

Post by tomc1985 »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #47
tomc1985 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not needed. Cost of doing business.

I don't trust the US government to write good rights for scrapers. They can't even do computer crime sentences well. At best, it's a burden for no solid gain for society. At worst, there will be loopholes used to DoS businesses because they can't shut down individuals due to law-given rights, and that will lead to court fights. These rights would do nothing but save scraper authors from learning to obfuscate their ac…

Information wants to be free. People should stop fighting it!

If one makes information "public" but don't really want to share it, then the public is fully justified in taking it.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#62

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dahart wrote: post #60
danschumann wrote: post #10

Being a programmer not a lawyer, I like the idea of more rights for scrapers. I don't want to see the internet partitioned away and owned by a few companies, especially when that information is often called a "public profile".

> Being a programmer not a lawyer, I like the idea of more rights for scrapers. What rights should scrapers have that they don't right now? Keep in mind that a lot of the scraping going on is just some other private company abusing access and hoping to gather and use the information for their own private profit. How many companies are scraping StackOverflow for example and doing nothing but attempting to copy it and…

Consider that should anything ever happen to the sites they scrape, suddenly they become super valuable to the rest of us. Decentralized information is not a bad thing. And arguably, if monetizing those scraped sites pay for them duplicating the data to additional places, I think that's probably fine.

Arguably, if they do a better job getting that information in results to people who need it in search, they may be performing a service there as well. (A lot of decently informative sites have absolutely awful search/visibility.)

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#64

Post by unepipe »

moojah wrote: post #52
djsumdog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works. You're just issuing a request and getting things back. Sometimes in a web browser, sometimes not. But the content itself may still be copyright. You can't just take it, even though for now, the publisher/server is allowing you to view it for free. But what if you only chose to view some of the content (e.g. block ads). What if you apply your own styles to…

The interesting part here is that linkedin doesn't hold any copyright on much of the data. You cannot copyright someones name and title.

But you can copyright a database.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#65

Post by anandsuresh »

iamleppert wrote: post #51

I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest. LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used t…

This is a tricky issue that has more to do with user psychology than technology. While the data is public, most users do not understand the persistence characteristics of data, especially in the presence of 3rd parties.

In a world where there are no (persistent) copies made by third-parties, the user still is in control of the visibility of their data by updating their profile directly on LinkedIn to show/hide pieces as they see fit. With a 3rd-party in the picture, updates to user-data may or may not be respected by the 3rd party, leading to poor user-experience.

Quoting the article, "HiQ Labs uses the LinkedIn data to build algorithms capable of predicting employee behaviors, such as when they might quit."

Based on that one statement alone, as an employee, I would be uncomfortable with the use of my data to supply my employer with my future plans before I choose to disclose it myself. That choice is mine, and mine alone; not something to be monetized simply because the option exists. And while I have no control over the sharing of data, should something like this happen to me, I'd be more inclined to stop using LinkedIn, which in-turn affects LinkedIn's ability to do business.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#66

Post by rickpmg »

iamleppert wrote: post #51

I fully support this decision. If you're offering a service that is public, with the intent to your users that such information will be available publicly, you cannot then police what users of that data you consider to be "public" because it serves your business interest. LinkedIn, of course, wants to get all the benefit of the public Internet with providing as little as they can. This, coming from someone who used t…

I have no love for linkedin, but not sure of your position.

They collected the data, host it, etc, and incur costs for doing so. Just because they allow the public to access it, doesn't mean the public should have a right to re-use it.

People argue that the data is public. I say that's not the issue. While the data itself might be available elsewhere, it is raiding the _collection_ of it that is being argued, not that 'public' data is 'private'.

The _value_ that LinkedIn adds is that they've built the structure to collect and maintain the data. They are _not_ asking the court to prohibit anyone from collecting the same data on their own, at their own expense. If someone wants to start a rival LinkedIn, they are free to do so.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#67

Post by feelin_googley »

Here's a copy of the pleading: http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/sites/292/2017...

"In a press statement, LinkedIn says: "Our members control the information that they make available to others on LinkedIn and they trust us to honor that control. HiQ is taking member data, without their knowledge, and using it for purposes our members haven't agreed to.""

I use a text-only browser. As old-timers know the first web browser back in the early 1990's was also text-only. Text-only atill works great, believe it or not. Especially for reading information like one finds on LinkedIn.

I cannot acess LinkedIn after the Microsoft acquisition.

Microsoft says members control access. Do they check a box that says

   [ ] Disallow blind users from viewing my profile as text-only.
or

   [ ] Disallow access by HiQ.
The Microsoft statement says HiQ is "taking member data" without their knowledge. This sounds as though members are unaware "they" had a decision to make whether HiQ can access their profile, or whether a noncommercial user can access their profile with, e.g, links, w3m, lynx or the W3 Consortium's line mode browser. Indeed I doubt members either know or care about such access.

And if Microsoft partners with a company such as HiQ, then do members get a veto on use of their profile?

I think members probably have no right to even be informed that such partnerships exist!

Did LinkedIn members have any say in whether the company could sell itself, and control over access to their profiles, to Microsoft?

Web users today generally have little ability to control how companies share their data (e.g. with advertisers and partner companies).

We saw this type of argument in the 3Taps case. Where we were asked to believe Craigslist users were the ones enforcing their copyright or that they designated Craigslist to act as their agent. Anyone who uses the web knows this is utter BS.

"U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen will preside over Thursday's hearing. At an earlier proceeding, on June 29, he appeared torn by the issues presented. On the one hand, he expressed skepticism that the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act-a criminal statute-really barred the mere use of bots to harvest public information. "You can get it manually if you hired a hundred million people to do it," he observed, "but if you want to do it quickly and automatedly, you can't do it? That is a crime?"

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#68

Post by dawnerd »

fooey wrote: post #50
dawnerd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd most certainly whitelist the google ips.

that's against TOS for Google SERPs Showing different results to google than you do to users is called cloaking and it's not allowed

Definitely, but someone at LinkedIn could get in touch with their google contact and make it all work and follow the rules.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

Apparently, we had something similar at Demand Media before the panda update.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#69

Post by phkahler »

I would prefer if my LinkedIn data was not public in the sense that one should have to be logged in to see it, and ideally I should be able to see who viewed it. If you have to be logged in to look, they can obviously limit the number of profiles you can view to prevent scraping.

Re: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

#70

Post by jlarocco »

djsumdog wrote: post #27
danschumann wrote: post #10

Being a programmer not a lawyer, I like the idea of more rights for scrapers. I don't want to see the internet partitioned away and owned by a few companies, especially when that information is often called a "public profile".

It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works. You're just issuing a request and getting things back. Sometimes in a web browser, sometimes not. But the content itself may still be copyright. You can't just take it, even though for now, the publisher/server is allowing you to view it for free. But what if you only chose to view some of the content (e.g. block ads). What if you apply your own styles to…

> It gets into the incredibly murky water of how the web works.

There's no "murky water" in how the web works. It's very clear and precise, and anybody can learn how it works. It has to be precise and well defined, because computers can't operate any other way.

If Linkedin doesn't want "public" profile data to be accessible to everybody then they need to stop calling it public and put it behind some kind of access control.

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