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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

#111

Post by Nextgrid »

gkoberger wrote: post #54
ptero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite like that. The first company cannot prevent scraping by individuals or another company of information that it already shows to everyone. Which, to me, is a good thing. My 2c.

Eh. I want my picture and name uploaded to LinkedIn, since it's a professional network and people use it to find me for good reasons. It may seem dumb, however not having a LinkedIn with a good picture can genuinely hurt your career. I do NOT want my picture run through facial recognition software, or my name/email sold to marketers who will add it to a drip campaign.

Then don't make the data public. You can't have the cake and eat it too. Scraping is irrelevant here - a human can just as well take your picture from your LinkedIn page and include it in their face-recognition DB.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#112

Post by themacguffinman »

Barrin92 wrote: post #38

As expected a lot of people here talking about public data and whatnot, but that is a horrible decision. "Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon said hiQ, which makes software to help employers determine whether employees will stay or quit, showed it faced irreparable harm absent an injunction because it might go out of business without access.[...] “LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its use…

> No end-user in their right mind publishes data on LinkedIn with the expectation that the information is bought up by a third party, analysed, and then sold back to your employer in a way that exposes your personal intent and may even threaten your job.

Yes they do. Do you think people who are afraid of their employer finding out about something would show it on their public LinkedIn profile in the first place? If a manager or colleague who they've likely already "connected" with simply opens your LinkedIn profile in their web browser and sees the same info that hiQ sees, then it's game over. If you don't want your employer to know, don't publish it on your public profile. It's absurd to suggest that some minimal manual effort to load a few profiles is a serious privacy defense.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#113

Post by polygot »

polygot wrote: post #19
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.

Also, it outputs XML and RSS too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntu.rss and https://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntu.xml

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#114

Post by Barrin92 »

alkonaut wrote: post #100
Barrin92 wrote: post #38

As expected a lot of people here talking about public data and whatnot, but that is a horrible decision. "Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon said hiQ, which makes software to help employers determine whether employees will stay or quit, showed it faced irreparable harm absent an injunction because it might go out of business without access.[...] “LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its use…

> No end-user in their right mind publishes data on LinkedIn with the expectation that the information is bought up by a third party, analysed, and then sold back to your employer in a way that exposes your personal intent and may even threaten your job. Doesn't that get covered by laws such as GDPR (where applicable)? Just because I can scape your profile doesn't mean I can publish it, sell it etc (or even keep it).…

GDPR requires affirmative and explicit consent to data-sharing. I am not a lawyer so I'm happy to be corrected by someone who has more regulatory knowledge here, but I am reasonably certain this company would not be allowed to operate this way in Europe.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#115

Post by ahbyb »

polygot wrote: post #113
polygot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it outputs XML and RSS too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntu.rss and https://www.reddit.com/r/ubuntu.xml

xml and rss seem to be the same exact output

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#116

Post by [deleted] »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #59
pixelmonkey wrote: post #15

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…

Not sure "isn't LinkedIn property" is accurate here. They still retain ownership and control of redistribution just like any other IP. This is more of a philosophical question about whether "viewing" itself is a violation of their ownership rights and really about the definitions of "viewing" and "public" in the context of the internet. Seems like they've simply determined that viewing any freely accessible URL is "p…

[deleted]

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

gkoberger wrote: post #54
ptero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite like that. The first company cannot prevent scraping by individuals or another company of information that it already shows to everyone. Which, to me, is a good thing. My 2c.

Eh. I want my picture and name uploaded to LinkedIn, since it's a professional network and people use it to find me for good reasons. It may seem dumb, however not having a LinkedIn with a good picture can genuinely hurt your career. I do NOT want my picture run through facial recognition software, or my name/email sold to marketers who will add it to a drip campaign.

PIIs and biometrics are special. So if I upload my photo to LinkedIn, I want it to be available when viewing my LinkedIn profile, but I expect that any other entity that scraps it off LinkedIn can't process it without my explicit consent (thanks to GDPR). Similarly with other data that's about me, a person.

But all other data, I'd argue, should be fair play. If an e-commerce sites publishes a list of products and prices, I believe it's desirable for other parties to be able to scrap it and process it, e.g. for offering a price comparison service.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#119

Post by NKosmatos »

This whole situation with public data, personal information, data scrapping, GDPR and us putting our own info on various sites displaying them publicly and then complaining if someone collects them and uses them, has gotten out of hand :-( I think I’ll have to side with hiQ on this.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#120

Post by xupybd »

After finding this https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper, I strongly recommend against having a profile photo on linkedin. It has caused me to be far more careful about my presence on the internet.

In the post privacy age I don't want my personal opinions to come back and haunt me. I grow as a person but the internet remembers all. If I make a dumb mistake and it's published online that's not a problem for me in 10 years if that fades away. But people are collecting and correlating info now. I don't like it one bit. It means someone you've never met, in a country you've never been to could extort you. It's getting very scary.

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