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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

#71

Post by mrwww »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #46
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 weaponiz…

I believe LinkedIn started providing some services similar to HiQ, which is one of their arguments.

How can your profile be public but not vaccumed up? Google vacuums it to index of course. Or perhaps you mean only public on Linkedin?

What the Russians or any other bad actor you care to think about already has done with your public profile is probably way way sleazier.

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

#72

Post by jjk166 »

danuker wrote: post #56
jakelazaroff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 weaponiz…

> 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. LinkedIn is a authwalled garden only available to those with accounts. "We may or may not have a Jake Lazaroff. Who's asking?". Sounds like you need a personal website.

When most people say they want things to be public, they typically mean "accessible to those who have a legitimate reason to access it, which may include some people I have not explicitly authorized."

Also LinkedIn does have public profile settings which allow some or all of your profile to be visible without an account.

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/83/linkedin-pu...

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

#74

Post by jjk166 »

bingidingi wrote: post #47
nojito wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's not a dubious application. The CFAA says that it's illegal to access a computer system you don't have authorization to access, regardless of whether it's technically possible. It's no different than if a manager banned someone from a restaurant - if they return, even though the restaurant is easily accessible, they are nevertheless trespassing.

The recent ruling on the CFAA introduces some confusion in that if a user has authorization to access a system, they are no longer in violation of the CFAA even if they access it for disallowed reasons (ie if you're allowed in the krusty krab, you're not trespassing even if you only went there to steal the krabby patty secret formula). But that's irrelevant here because hiQ was explicitly told they did not have authorization to access (ie Plankton isn't allowed in the krusty krab regardless of what he intends to do there).

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

#75

Post by jrochkind1 »

cletus wrote: post #70
jrochkind1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by taking up this case SCOTUS is potentially going in the other direction. They didn't actually take it up, but sent it back to the 9th for a re-hearing in light of Van Buren v. US. But that ruling seems to make LinkedIn's case even weaker, I too am somewhat confused about what's going on, what options were available to the supreme court and what signal this one sends. Anyone have a better article?

Thanks for highlighting this. Honestly I missed this subtlety but it does make it even clearer: SCOTUS is asking the Appeals Court to revisit if bots constitute "unauthorized" use (under CFAA). Van Buren decided that if an authorized user used a computer system for what were effectively policy violations and didn't bypass restrictions on that use then it's not "unauthorized" in the CFAA sense. Consider a phone book (…

> If the LinkedIn decision stands, such impediments may be blocked by courts. That's probably not a good outcome.

Nope, I think you have it totally incorrect. The issue isn't whether it can be illegal to put technology impediments in place -- that isn't a claim in this case.

The issue is potentially whether you can charge someone with a felony for working around the impediments you put in place. (i'm not totally sure if that is relevant in this case?) Or even more so, if you can charge someone with a felony for hacking for just doing something you politely asked them not to do.

But there is nothing at stake here that could possibly make it illegal to put technological impediments like rate-limiting or CAPTCHA's in place. If I'm wrong, please direct me to the details of where/why. But that was definitely not at stake in Van Buren v. US, which is what the Supreme Court says prompted the remit for a re-hearing. The CFAA is about a felony crime of unauthorized access; nothing in it, decided either way, can make it a crime (or "blocked by courts") to put technological impediments in place.

But overall, OP article is doing a very poor job of explaining either the facts or law of this case, so there's a lot I'm not sure about from just this write-up and what else I've been able to lazily google alone.

If anyone has a better article explaining the relevant facts and law in dispute here, I'm still interested.

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

#76

Post by rhacker »

It seems absolutely nuts to me that this case ended where it did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spokeo,_Inc._v._Robins

And we're having a discussion about linkedin might possibly lose. In the spokeo case it's data that Robins said was untrue about him and Spokeo was allowed to keep sharing it - simply because he couldn't prove harm.

Which, is laughable in TODAY's political climate where harm is waking up in the morning - because of all the data sharing happening everywhere and being unable to stop it.

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

#77

Post by xbar »

ID1452319 wrote: post #68
rurabe wrote: post #19

Note that LinkedIn could make this whole issue moot by putting their data behind a login tomorrow. The 9th circuit decision pretty clearly stated that. The only reason the data is public is for marketing purposes, to sign up more users.

I want some of my LinkedIn profile to be public. I DON'T want any random company scraping that PII data, storing it, processing it and making money from it. Is that too much to ask?

Of whom?

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

#78

Post by jjk166 »

dannyw wrote: post #53
cletus wrote: post #33

The Supreme Court curtailed the broad scope of the CFAA recently in the van Buren case. I personally agree with that decision (and also find it funny as it continues the long trend of Clarence Thomas being on the wrong side of history). While van Buren's actions were obviously problematic he was an authorized user of the computer system. The issue is the vagueness of the CFAA has been a prosecutor's wet dream and a p…

My counterpoint: companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too, as in offering public content, but then preventing competitors from using that public content. To use another example, what if Google+ was a success, and Google blocks every other competing search engine from indexing even public posts on Google+? Is that a good outcome? There are already copyright protections to stop Shutterstock from rippin…

Let's say you own a restaurant. It's a public place, people are welcome to come on in and take a seat. But there's a guy across the street who likes to come in, take pictures of everyone eating there, piss off your customers, and then leave without even ordering anything. After he's done this several times, you tell him he's not allowed in your restaurant anymore. He comes back anyways. Is he trespassing?

This isn't a matter of stealing information. HiQ is more than welcome to acquire the information by other means. If hiQ scraped the same information from an archive site hosted by someone else it would be fine. But they've been explicitly told they're not authorized to access linkedin, and the CFAA is unambiguous that if you don't have authorization to access a system it's illegal to access it anyways, which is very much in keeping with how we'd treat access to a brick and mortar public business.

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

#79

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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…

On the other hand, I want to use linkedin without my data being taken by other companies. It’s my data, not linkedin’s and certainly not hiq’s.

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

#80

Post by MR4D »

To me, this is simple:

If the pages are not behind a login, then they are PUBLIC, and open to any sort of data gathering.

If the pages are behind a login, then they are PRIVATE, and have all the protections alongside it.

Frankly, this bullcrap about "it's not public, but we want to leverage the usage of the open web as it suits us" to build our monopoly crap is getting old.[0]

[0] - I don't care who the company is, whether Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Google, or some no-name company

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