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U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#41

Post by gnicholas »

bpodgursky wrote: post #40
gnicholas wrote: post #38

I had a strange experience with LinkedIn today: I had to restart my computer, and when my browser started it re-opened all my tabs. This included about 50 LinkedIn tabs, which I opened sometime over the last 3 months (most of them were opened yesterday). LinkedIn logged me out and accused me of unauthorized use or some such thing, and then locked me out for a period. When I submitted a help request and explained what…

It seems possible, but it also seems like a sorta painful problem to solve if locking an account requires dredging through 3+ months of a user's interactions. At a lot of companies that kind of historical data ends up getting batched and stored in some kind of timeseries datastore (aka S3) and then batch-operated on via Spark, MapReduce, Flink etc in hourly or daily jobs. So instead of implementing account locking an…

Fair enough, although 30 of the tabs were opened yesterday, as I was researching people who will be attending an upcoming presentation I'm giving.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#42

Post by cwkoss »

username90 wrote: post #36
cwkoss wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel strongly that non-commercial scraping should be protected. I think commercial scraping should probably be allowed, but there should be some sort of mandatory maximum retention limit, so deleted (or updated access controls on) content eventually ages out (or gets transferred to a non-commercial custodian for archival purposes).

I don't see why linkedin should be allowed to monetize it if other companies aren't. If they just monetized the website via ads it would be fine, but since they sell your aggregated data to people I don't see why other data brokers shouldn't be able to also sell your publicly available data. Linkedin as a data broker and linkedin as a website are two unrelated businesses, and extending dominance in one to the other i…

Well I'd like to see some regulation on commercial data brokers too.

I think individuals should have the right to know whether they are in datasets and the right to be deleted from that dataset upon request if they never gave direct consent to the entity holding their data. It seems extreme from where we are now, but maybe data brokers should be required to notify people when they're added to a dataset without direct consent, including instructions on how to be removed if they don't want to be included.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#43

Post by gnicholas »

Judgmentality wrote: post #39
gnicholas wrote: post #38

I had a strange experience with LinkedIn today: I had to restart my computer, and when my browser started it re-opened all my tabs. This included about 50 LinkedIn tabs, which I opened sometime over the last 3 months (most of them were opened yesterday). LinkedIn logged me out and accused me of unauthorized use or some such thing, and then locked me out for a period. When I submitted a help request and explained what…

Just curious, how many tabs do you normally have open?

Maybe 100? I use a Chromium-compatible version of the Tree-Style-Tabs extension, which makes it easy to organize and navigate dozens of tabs.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#44

Post by jb775 »

What a joke that the courts within our society are so obviously controlled by big business. LinkedIn is essentially asking for legal protection so they can box out competition as they pimp out user data they don't even really own in the first place.

The argument our society should be discussing is that individuals own the underlying data. All previous "user agreements" are null and void. All new user accounts should be bundled like non-fungible tokens, then every piece of data associated with that account can be tracked to compensate that user based on actual impressions. Companies can take their cut, but if a user isn't happy with the setup, they can revoke all access to their own data. Enough of this "you agreed to our service agreement" smoke and mirror bullshit...that's like saying the water company owns the water itself.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#45

Post by pverghese »

jb775 wrote: post #44

What a joke that the courts within our society are so obviously controlled by big business. LinkedIn is essentially asking for legal protection so they can box out competition as they pimp out user data they don't even really own in the first place. The argument our society should be discussing is that individuals own the underlying data. All previous "user agreements" are null and void. All new user accounts should…

By that same token, all use of free services should be charged from the time of use of said services, since previous agreements are nill and void.

By using said services you have provided your information given the understanding that your information will be used by the companies that provide the services

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#46

Post by jakelazaroff »

austincheney wrote: post #3

It is because I am a strong advocate for privacy that I believe Microsoft is wrong. If Microsoft really wanted to protect user privacy they would restrict access to user data on their platform. This is basic entry level security: apply access control . Microsoft wants to split hairs in order to both maximize revenue and prevent competitor access, which is nothing to do with privacy. If Microsoft wins companies will b…

Is hiQ a competitor to LinkedIn? They scrape people’s profiles so they can snitch to employers about employees whom they think are job hunting. AFAIK, that’s not a service LinkedIn provides.

Moreover, I would like it both ways. Access control would be great, but it sidesteps the underlying issue. I’m fine with my profile being public — in fact, I want it to be — but I don’t want my data to be vacuumed up and weaponized against me.

I agree that anti-hacking laws are not appropriate here. But what hiQ is doing is sleazy as heck, and we should absolutely try to throw out as much bathwater as possible without throwing out the baby too.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#47

Post by bingidingi »

nojito wrote: post #23
bingidingi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, important to note that Microsoft is going after a competitor here; there are a bunch of data brokers that have been scraping LinkedIn for years and this is the case they're going after. I hope the Supreme Court can see through this BS and tell them to go pound sand. (If Microsoft wanted to go after data brokers I'd be on board for that tho)

It was hiq that sued linkedin

...after LinkedIn sent them a cease and desist and started causing problems with hiQs third-party contracts. They went after hiQs business with a dubious application of existing laws (CFAA).

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#48

Post by [deleted] »

austincheney wrote: post #3

It is because I am a strong advocate for privacy that I believe Microsoft is wrong. If Microsoft really wanted to protect user privacy they would restrict access to user data on their platform. This is basic entry level security: apply access control . Microsoft wants to split hairs in order to both maximize revenue and prevent competitor access, which is nothing to do with privacy. If Microsoft wins companies will b…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#49

Post by Causality1 »

mrastro wrote: post #28
nojito wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was hiq that sued linkedin

After being threaten by LinkedIn: "LinkedIn told hiQ in 2017 to stop scraping LinkedIn's public profiles or face liability under the anti-hacking law." I think it's fair to say LinkedIn is the instigator in this case.

That seems like it would have been a breathtakingly easy problem to solve using technical means instead of legal threats. They could've required logins to view profile information. They could have blacklisted any IP address exhibiting automated behavior.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

#50

Post by onion2k »

Causality1 wrote: post #49
mrastro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After being threaten by LinkedIn: "LinkedIn told hiQ in 2017 to stop scraping LinkedIn's public profiles or face liability under the anti-hacking law." I think it's fair to say LinkedIn is the instigator in this case.

That seems like it would have been a breathtakingly easy problem to solve using technical means instead of legal threats. They could've required logins to view profile information. They could have blacklisted any IP address exhibiting automated behavior.

That sort of 'solution' is just a game of technical whack-a-mole as one party finds a new way to scrape the data and the other finds a new way to stop them though. If you want to permanently stop scrapping you need a non-technical solution that stops someone even trying.
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