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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

#151

Post by austhrow743 »

lonelappde wrote: post #142
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…

What gives you a rightful claim to information that I gave to someone else, if neither I nor they consent?

You did consent. This is about information you gave to LinkedIn and told them to give to the general public.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#152

Post by alt_f4 »

perl4ever wrote: post #42
alt_f4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they can, but they won't because robots includes search engines and blacklisting search engines from user profiles will very negatively impact their metrics.

You're implying they can't discriminate. So does this case make robots.txt illegal?

First off, robots.txt is optional. It's neither a technical nor a legal limitation at this point.

Second, OP's argument suggests a UI option that gives or removes user consent from all robots in general. Unless they plan to word it: "allow robots that we like that are good for us. but disallow other robots", I don't think it's okay to discriminate by either allowing/banning a particular robot, as that is not what the user agreed to.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#153

Post by genidoi »

mafuy wrote: post #138
genidoi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linkedin tried to argue that if they put data behind a login wall, then it no longer falls under the wide umbrella of "public data" and so it's "theirs". Previous cases already established that if a crawler can see the data without any session cookies then its okay. This ruling extended that to any data that can reasonably be accessed by any member of the public. There will probably be more cases like this as the upp…

> Previous cases already established that if a crawler can see the data without any session cookies then its okay. I'm interested in this, but I'm not sure how to learn more - can you give me a hint?

Do you mean crawling without cookies or the legal case?

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#154

Post by dx034 »

ptero wrote: post #21
psv1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

So Google would need to allow scraping of search results? That would be a huge change, they currently prevent that pretty aggressively.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#155

Post by r_singh »

crazygringo wrote: post #16

Question: This seems to mean LinkedIn can't sue to prevent scraping. I assume it's still legal for them to implement technological anti-scraping measures? So the two companies can play cat-and-mouse if they wish with rate-limiting, IP addresses, etc...

Not too hard to surpass those with things like residential proxies, randomised user agents, headless browsers, etc. Bring on the anti scraping measures...

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#156

Post by conjectures »

IP aside, anyone else concerned about the business of HiQ?

I presume what they are doing is:

* Scrape profiles.

* Calculate time delta in jobs.

* 'Predict' churn rate for (prospective) employee.

With respect to prospective employees in particular this seems likely to entail lots of risks. Average job time delta is going to be a massively overdetermined variable, and noisy wrt 'next job delta'. I'm worried how they're going to sell that to employers.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#157

Post by anticensor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #114
alkonaut wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They would continue to ignore the law. I have seen the forced "consent" buttons countless times.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#158

Post by perl4ever »

jakeogh wrote: post #52
perl4ever wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations do effectively make law, at least in the US. Politicians have neither the time nor the expertise. There have been some widely read articles about how sometimes that law is not even freely available to the public.

Sounds like we agree that's a bad thing. To your first sentence, no, they propose laws. They dont get to revise their ToS and have it be a violation of the law when you ignore it. That would be like the EPA making a rule, because they were granted that power by congress.

My impression is that effectively, they do. Officially, the laws have to be approved, just like you have to click "ok" when you see a user agreement, but it doesn't mean you have any effective control. Control on paper doesn't mean control in reality, just like accounting is different from economics.

It's possible the current system is "the worst, except for all the others". I don't think you can do without expertise in making policy, but you also can't do without good faith/intent, so I don't know how you can resolve that.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#159

Post by tekknik »

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…

When you talk about data here these are people. This HiQ software is actually a bit scary. What if it gives a false signal which ends in an employees termination? Data on people should not be freely attainable, the person should give explicit access. If I don’t want HiQ processing my information (I don’t) then they shouldn’t be able to. Especially now with some employers requiring a LinkedIn profile.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#160

Post by tekknik »

Nextgrid wrote: post #111
gkoberger wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The huge difference is having a human do it at scale is cost prohibitive.
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