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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

#271

Post by rdslw »

icebraining wrote: post #264
wolco wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case you go in and request the price and they tell you. They can't stop you from sharing the price its public now.

No, they didn't tell HiQ. In fact, HiQ is suing LinkedIn because LinkedIn refuse to tell them.

No, they did tell then stopped on 5th product.

LIN gives this information (product price) for first few questions, then if you ask about 5th price they say: 403, no more for you. WHILE IF at the same moment, different person (or you in proxy-ip-disguise) comes and asks for 5th product price, LIN happily (and publicly) gives this information.

And if the person comes wearing googlebot tshirt, LIN drops to knees and give a ..... full-db-dump-job ;) Bing/Baidu thsirts also fit. Source: www.linkedin.com/robots.txt

HiQ simply says: that's unfair you can't decide who is good and whois bad. Effectively LIN bans any google competitor (documented case).

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

#272

Post by lightbyte »

polote wrote: post #41

So they want to forbid a startup to scrap the personal data of their users as if Linkedin was the only company allowed to have access to this data. I mean it is completely crazy, it is not LinkedIn data it is OUR data

Are you paying the hosting costs for LinkedIn's site and database? Their users gave LinkedIn the data, it's now theirs.

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

#274

Post by pavlakoos »

icebraining wrote: post #267
pavlakoos wrote: post #231

Shouldn't LinkedIn simply introduce captcha?

For accessing the public page of profiles?

Well, not just for accessing, but for scraping, meaning accessing a huge number of those pages in an automated way.

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

#275

Post by icebraining »

pavlakoos wrote: post #274
icebraining wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For accessing the public page of profiles?

Well, not just for accessing, but for scraping, meaning accessing a huge number of those pages in an automated way.

How would that work for Google?

If you think they shouldn't show it for Google, then that's what HiQ is suing them over :)

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

#276

Post by BearGoesChirp »

vacri wrote: post #124
rayiner wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Obviously LinkedIn can't control the information itself. But this case isn't about the information in the abstract. It's about an HTTP request to…

> There is no good reason to treat web servers differently than store fronts. LinkedIn should be able to control who accesses their web servers and how. These two statements do not agree with each other. An owner of a brick-and-mortar shop can't (legally) stand out the front and bar black people from entering, for example.

But they can bar lots of people for other reasons. Block short people, people with black hair, people wearing red. It gets a bit murky when they block people for something that is related to a protected class but not directly because of a protected class. For example blocking anyone wearing a cross because they block everyone wearing torture devices from entering.

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

#277

Post by graphitezepp »

icebraining wrote: post #266
DannyBee wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just like you can't fart in public and charge bystanders for the scent - you can't broadcast facts into the public and expect people not to recall them. I mean, you can. But good luck with that! " Do you also believe you can take the satellite tv signals beamed at your house and decrypt them? After all, they broadcasted them as widely as they possibly could! If they didn't want you to watch them, they shouldn't have…

Personally, I do think it should be legal to decrypt them.

Same. Little did parent commentator know, there are plenty of radical "all information should be free" thinkers in these parts.

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

#278

Post by phkahler »

phkahler wrote: post #69

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.

Awesome! The day after this post I logged in to LinkedIn and they promoted a (new?) feature where you can restrict who sees your profile. I turned it off as much as possible for people who are not logged in. IMHO they should probably make that the default if they don't want people scraping data.

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

#279

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rayiner wrote: post #261
dawidloubser wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's not. In your analogy, the storefront is completely passive and unaffected. What is actually happening, is that somebody is walking into the store, asks a question about the stock or the price of the products on sale, which the store employee willingly answers. Then, all of the sudden, the store wishes to control what you do with the answer that was willingly given to you. This is clearly absurd - and s…

No that's not what's happening. What was happening is that the store clerk was noticing that an employee from a competitor was coming in and asking questions about the price, and then refused to answer the questions. The judge ordered LinkedIn to respond to the competitors HTTP requests.

Where do you draw the line between this and a DoS flood of HTTP requests? At some point a provider has to be able to rate limit requests to maintain service for legitimate users.

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

#280

Post by JonathanAgosto »

lightbyte wrote: post #272
polote wrote: post #41

So they want to forbid a startup to scrap the personal data of their users as if Linkedin was the only company allowed to have access to this data. I mean it is completely crazy, it is not LinkedIn data it is OUR data

Are you paying the hosting costs for LinkedIn's site and database? Their users gave LinkedIn the data, it's now theirs.

That's the equivalent of sending your resume to a company for a job opening and the company saying, "since this resume is now on our control, we own the information in it."
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