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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

#81

Post by danielrhodes »

LinkedIn has played a very poor strategy here. The value of the service should be in the network, which is quite defensible. Instead, they’ve made the value in the profiles, which is not defensible. Few people curate their network on LinkedIn because you can't see profiles unless you are closely connected, so you are incentivized to add as many people as possible, thus devaluing the entire network. Then they go and sell unlimited access to profiles to recruiters and sales people. Thus, when other services come around and scrape their data, which LinkedIn needs to make somewhat publicly available for SEO juice, it becomes an existential threat.

If you look at Facebook, there is some limited profile data publicly available, but they will go to the wall to prevent people from seeing how those people are connected. In addition, they started from a very walled-off position, so they didn't become reliant on SEO traffic.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#82

Post by jjeaff »

bobthepanda wrote: post #20
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 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?

I'm not certain, but it kind of sounds like even things behind a login are still scrapable. Assuming the general public can get a login easily anyway. Basically, just requiring an account is not enough to forbid scraping.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#83

Post by jjeaff »

perl4ever wrote: post #43
thomascgalvin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An earlier ruling actually ordered LinkedIn to stop attempting to block the scraping using technological measures, too.

Has robots.txt been outlawed now? In what jurisdiction exactly?

Robots.txt doesn't restrict anything. It's just a request of what should and shouldn't be scraped by search engine spiders.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#86

Post by rebuilder »

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…

Maybe it's more accurate to say "any publicly linked URL"? IIRC, charges have been successfully brought against people for e.g. iterating through user identifiers in URLs to gain access to other users' data. (Do correct me if I'm wrong on that count!)

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#87

Post by close04 »

jjeaff wrote: post #70
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I enter my employment record and my profile pic, birthdate, etc, I don't think that is the ip of linkedin. Maybe the way they display it or if they are transforming it in some way it could be considered ip. But if someone scrapes all that user entered data and then displays it somewhere else in a different format, I can't imagine LinkedIn being able to claim their ip has been infringed.

I think this all of this should be the user's choice since every company should put the user at the center of these decisions. If I want my data to be shared in any way I can simply tick a box and allow that. If I don't then keep it just for me and the people I chose to share it on that platform.

It should also be made clear to the users if that data is being used as payment for the services provided by mentioning explicitly and in a detailed way where that data goes.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#88

Post by komali2 »

rebuilder wrote: post #86
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it's more accurate to say "any publicly linked URL"? IIRC, charges have been successfully brought against people for e.g. iterating through user identifiers in URLs to gain access to other users' data. (Do correct me if I'm wrong on that count!)

Some kid was charged for that but in my opinion it was stupid. URL to me means part of the UX. If you search on Google using a query parameter directly instead of entering the query in their search box, should that count as wrongful use?

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#89

Post by jjeaff »

nitrogen wrote: post #64
jakeogh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By letting ToS have the force of law...

What is a contract if not something backed by the force of law? There's a big difference between "I want a public profile so colleagues and employers can contact me about opportunities" vs "I want a public profile so some third party I have no knowledge of can enable others to discriminate against me".

Try contacting the police if someone breaches your tos. They will tell you to get a lawyer and not bother them.

You have to sue for breach of contract. It's a civil matter rather than a legal one if breached.

Re: LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

#90

Post by Sharlin »

freeone3000 wrote: post #60
perl4ever wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it can be scraped/crawled, that is, it isn’t LinkedIn property" I thought it was pretty established that putting something on a website didn't eliminate your copyright. Has that changed now? To me, it seems like common sense would be that if you make a public website, you are implicitly permitting some copies, but surely it's not all or nothing?

Facts and tables are not copyrightable. The phone numbers in a phone book are not copyrightable, merely their presentation order[0]. If you were to copy, say, the linkedin website , or the linkedin branding, or the name linkedin, or any of their ads, those would be eligible, but the simple collection of names, emails, and phone numbers is ineligible for copyright. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_…

This depends on jurisdiction though. In the European Union specifically there exists sui generis legislation that grants certain rights to the assembler of a database [1]. However, it’s a more interesting situation when the database keeper just provides a means for individuals to fill in their own data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

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