101–110 of 168 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even better, the decision here is only concerning profiles of people who have elected to make that profile public. It's very simple to make your LinkedIn profile private.
The concern I had is that the court forces LinkedIn profiles public regardless of user settings. Courts sometimes go a little further. I'm sure LinkedIn will do their best to not allow private profiles to be crawled.
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.
However, the general principle of "Data Scraping as a Business Model" bothers me. This is by no means the only company that does it (I suspect that MS does it with their access to LinkedIn).
There are far more egregious instances, and many of them have ways to get users to voluntarily cede information (can you think of a rather obvious example?).
LinkedIn is a sandwich board. It's meant to be a public showcase. If you want private, I suspect there are much more focused (and probably valuable) venues that cater to particular communities.
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…
Personally, this doesn't bother me too much. I use LinkedIn specifically because it is public. I'm an "open kimono" type of person. Not particularly interested in hiding stuff. However, the general principle of "Data Scraping as a Business Model" bothers me. This is by no means the only company that does it (I suspect that MS does it with their access to LinkedIn). There are far more egregious instances, and many of…
Well, so the company, HiQ, is basically scraping every time you update your linked in, to tell your employer you might be about to leave.
Now maybe that's cool with you. But it seems super sketchy to me, and one reason I deleted my linkedIn altogether.
Anyone versed in U.S. law who can comment on whether the judgement in this case sets a precedent?
Personally, this doesn't bother me too much. I use LinkedIn specifically because it is public. I'm an "open kimono" type of person. Not particularly interested in hiding stuff. However, the general principle of "Data Scraping as a Business Model" bothers me. This is by no means the only company that does it (I suspect that MS does it with their access to LinkedIn). There are far more egregious instances, and many of…
> Not particularly interested in hiding stuff. Well, so the company, HiQ, is basically scraping every time you update your linked in, to tell your employer you might be about to leave. Now maybe that's cool with you. But it seems super sketchy to me, and one reason I deleted my linkedIn altogether.
It is not "cool" with me. It just means that it isn't a factor for me. I would not have used LI for a job search in any obvious way.
If I keep a fairly current and active generic profile, then LI is useful, and no one needs to know whether or not I'm looking.
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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.
I don't agree to republish them. Just because they are publicly accessible on SiteA doesn't mean I have agreed to have them be published on SiteB does it?
The question at hand is whether or not SiteB (or more appropriately CompanyB) is able to automatically download the content on SiteA or have to make an intern manually copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet.
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.
There is a broader ethical discussion of how to treat data, nominally public, that is increasingly collected, persisted and analyzed indefinitely by adversarial agents. It seems clear to me that a more nuanced categorization is required. This data is not public in the same sense as an uttered word was in a town square a hundred years ago. Imagine being denied job opportunities because some company has analyzed the ca…
This is also a clear case where GDPR would come in. This is personal data, whether intentional or not, and the scraper is obliged to conform to EU laws if they scrape data on EU citizens - including eg information rights and deletion.