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LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

reuters.com

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Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#11

Post by tdhoot »

OrgNet wrote: post #3
echelon wrote: post #2

This is fantastic. I would like to see wider legislation allowing scraping of IMDB, Genius, Reddit, Facebook, and Google made legal. These services receive free input from users. The data should remain free. Edit (sort of off topic): There's still value in the building and providing services at scale, but this lowers the barrier to cross the moat for small players. The first step is data liberation. Then we can work…

for IMDb, they have a lot of data that is easily accessible, not sure what is missing though: https://datasets.imdbws.com/.. .

Only for personal and non-commercial use, which is probably not what startups need.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#12

Post by jakeogh »

echelon wrote: post #2

This is fantastic. I would like to see wider legislation allowing scraping of IMDB, Genius, Reddit, Facebook, and Google made legal. These services receive free input from users. The data should remain free. Edit (sort of off topic): There's still value in the building and providing services at scale, but this lowers the barrier to cross the moat for small players. The first step is data liberation. Then we can work…

It's already legal. Adding law adds restrictions.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#13

Post by gist »

I think also what most people don't realize is that linkedin's current model makes it difficult to access someone's profile without them knowing (if they pay for it and have the option on their account) to see who is looking at their profile. As such the user wanting to look at a person's profile has no privacy that they have done so. There could be many reasons someone looks at someone else's profile (even just some kind of curiosity or mistake) so this to me is an issue in itself.

Sure there are ways around this (you can make up a fake profile and some info is public but normally what I run into is a request to login to linkedin to view something that I am interested in).

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#15

Post by pixelmonkey »

The summary here is that LinkedIn tried to argue that it could prevent scraping of public LinkedIn profile data under their ToS, but the courts have ruled that if data is public and provided by users, it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property. This is generally a positive outcome for people/companies turning web text and HTML into structured data, e.g. tools like Puppeteer and Scrapy can be used more freely on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit. Now, you might still get into trouble if you re-publish that data, but you can, at least, safely use the data ”internally”, and the act of scraping/crawling (politely) is not, per se, something unlawful.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#17

Post by jakeogh »

kovek wrote: post #10
Nextgrid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The users agreed to publish their details publicly on LinkedIn. It’s normal that anyone can access those details and use them however they like.

What if there could be a robot.txt kind of setting that users could use to prevent being scraped?

Pointless unless you want a one world governement to enforce a law monoculture.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#18

Post by scarface74 »

gist wrote: post #13

I think also what most people don't realize is that linkedin's current model makes it difficult to access someone's profile without them knowing (if they pay for it and have the option on their account) to see who is looking at their profile. As such the user wanting to look at a person's profile has no privacy that they have done so. There could be many reasons someone looks at someone else's profile (even just some…

There is a setting that lets you see other people’s profile without them being notified. You can do it with free accounts. But you also can’t see who viewed your profile.

If you pay, you can keep your viewing private while seeing other people’s profile.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#19

Post by polygot »

echelon wrote: post #2

This is fantastic. I would like to see wider legislation allowing scraping of IMDB, Genius, Reddit, Facebook, and Google made legal. These services receive free input from users. The data should remain free. Edit (sort of off topic): There's still value in the building and providing services at scale, but this lowers the barrier to cross the moat for small players. The first step is data liberation. Then we can work…

If you add .json to the end of a Reddit URL, it will return JSON data. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntu.json . It also works with comment threads and posts.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#20

Post by bobthepanda »

psv1 wrote: post #5
echelon wrote: post #2

This is fantastic. I would like to see wider legislation allowing scraping of IMDB, Genius, Reddit, Facebook, and Google made legal. These services receive free input from users. The data should remain free. Edit (sort of off topic): There's still value in the building and providing services at scale, but this lowers the barrier to cross the moat for small players. The first step is data liberation. Then we can work…

Another side of this is that the entity doing the scraping is more often than not another company. Which means that if your proposal is implemented, a user can voluntarily give their personal data to Google/Reddit/Facebook etc but that company then has to make the user's personal data available to another company.

It only applies to data displayed publicly, though. If Facebook and such started requiring logins to see personal data would that be such a bad thing?
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