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They're owned by Microsoft and poorly managed. Hundreds of people get locked out daily and can no longer access or change their OWN data. I say, let the scrapers take them down. We need to stop the walled in gardens of data these companies DONT own - it's the user's data.
I don’t get why LinkedIn should be gatekeeping this data that it doesn’t create. It’s bad for society.
Can the company just claim it’s for AI training and it’s fair use?
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I hope linkedIn looses.
A bunch of GTM and Sales APIs recently stopped offering their LinkedIn APis. Seems like the lawsuits are working to scare them off.

Prediction: this will be a very much pay to play market

Why are they going after the small fish?

If they really want to put a dent into this, go after the biggest players scraping LinkedIn: PeopleDataLabs and Apollo.io (and no, taking down their company page does not count)

Yeah, only Microsoft is allowed to indiscriminately scrape the web!

I somehow want both parties to lose.

So are they gonna go after pitchbook and crunchbase too or nah?
This happened before in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn.[0]

I've heard a lot of people cite this case as proof that scraping is legal, but it seems like the decision kept going back and forth in appeals, and I never understood what precedent it set, if any, around the legality of scraping.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

This one seems different from the (correct) ruling in favor in hiQ Labs, where the courts were quite clear that scraping the public Internet was completely legal.

This is a case of a company creating millions of fake user accounts, so they’re behind the login wall and not on the public side of the Internet anymore. At least, that’s how I’m reading this.

basically, linkedin is just pissed off they weren't getting a cut of the profits this small company made on linkedins (already public?) data.

The winners here are the law firms on both the plaintiff and defendant sides. Drag this through the court system for as long as possible. PR. PR. PR. Then settle out of court for an "undisclosed amount."

This is the mafia equivalent of "sending a message" in corporate land. Yawn.

The company that put an Email proxy on people's phones to scrape all email going in and out has a complaint about scraping?
I'm old enough to remember when pretty much every single social media company had really nice APIs so third party clients could be built.

Oh man, a lot of the web really feels very enshittified these days.

Only a linkedin executive could consider user submitted personal information to be "their" data
Well maybe I can get that company to backup my LinkedIn posts because it is utterly broken to download anything about my profile to make a backup.

There is an API option but endpoints from documentation just return 404. There is Data Privacy "download my data" I wanted really data like my posts, photos not crappy CSV having basic properties. In the end there is "View the rich media" but also I have to click one by one and there is no text for posts on the images - I can do that going one by one of my posts and copy pasting. It sucks despite "your data belongs to you" texts on the labels.

If I had the Infinity Gems but I could only use them once, I would strongly consider snapping LinkedIn out of existence.
Curious if Dex (YC 19) (getdex.com) is at risk — their LinkedIn integration requires a chrome extension to scrape data rather than LinkedIn APIs.
Oh dear, my office has been scraping LinkedIn forever. We use it to make visual networks of contacts in our industry, and relate that to whom we have working for the company. oops.
On that note, I've noticed an uptick in past coworkers as Facebook recommended friends. How does it know about these people I've worked with?
There are already many companies offering bots creation for social media, they might not sell the data, but they do sell the bots.
So tired of their auth wall, screw 'em.
they could have instead try to understand what are they missing (what / how is driving that scraping demand?) - and maybe try to do that themselves

or partner up to amplify that other use case

but I guess we are in the lawyers divide and conquer mentality these days