Huh. Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content. Probably a good thing IMO. I would put money on the public statement by a LinkedIn official saying "Your profile is yours" will bite them in the future as they certainly don't treat it that way.
I created a second LinkedIn account for testing purposes and recently I started getting this which I thought was strange as this account had been live for several years. What changed recently? Could this restriction also be because of the push to block mass scraping?
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Access to your account has been temporarily restricted
Why did this happen?
We take proactive actions to protect you when we detect potential unauthorized access or other activity that doesn’t comply with our policies.
What can I do next?
We first need to verify your identity to ensure your account safety. To regain access to your account, please submit a government-issued ID.
I recently tried to revive my account after not having accessed it for a decade or so. They asked for my gov issued ID, to be processed by the Persona service. Um, hell no.
Maybe not for the HN crowd, but it's a requirement for applying to a lot of places if you're just an average person and/ or not in tech. I only started getting interviews after I finally put a picture on my profile. It sucks, but its used by a LOT of employers if only to try to verify you're an actual person.
The broadly open internet is probably not long for this world. If you scrape using fake accounts, that clearly violates ToS you agree to. Whereas for public pages it's less clear how courts will rule.
With companies increasingly viewing their defenseability and value as their data, their online presence will become more gated, and curated through their managed experiences. Social media, news, reddit, etc are already like this, and it's not inconceivable that companies like Amazon, Ebay (who are fighting their own scraping battles) move the direction of sign in to visit more than a few pages.
This would mean that we'll all be forced to use accounts to see anything substantial within a site. And it'll be harder to view things across sites.
I know that this particular case is about scraping personal data, but I think it's a catalyst for many upcoming lawsuits that will broadly shift the internet in an undesirable direction
One case that does seem to have the potential to be precedent setting in the US seems to be Air Canada's litigation against Seats.aero, who is also continuing to scrape Air Canada's award inventory data despite Air Canada loginwalling for award search a year after it filed this lawsuit. [1][2]
Meanwhile, AI-generated slop sites that slurp up open APIs on ATSes are eating LinkedIn's lunch for job search. Very few companies are using LinkedIn as the place to manage applications, most are pushing to LinkedIn and redirecting to their ATSes.
They should fix impersonation of employees and more importantly recruiters. I've had so much fake recruiters contact me, I can't tell who is real and who is fake anymore.
It's an easy fix, just have the recruiters verify with an email every month, but they don't so it makes me think they either encourage it or they really don't care because they benefit somehow.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] thread----
Access to your account has been temporarily restricted
Why did this happen?
We take proactive actions to protect you when we detect potential unauthorized access or other activity that doesn’t comply with our policies.
What can I do next?
We first need to verify your identity to ensure your account safety. To regain access to your account, please submit a government-issued ID.
Learn more about verifying your identity.
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I get wanting some kind of verification but hell no I'm not giving you a photo of my ID.
Let me make a new account then. But they won't.
You'll also benefit from better privacy if you never register to begin with.
Source:
With companies increasingly viewing their defenseability and value as their data, their online presence will become more gated, and curated through their managed experiences. Social media, news, reddit, etc are already like this, and it's not inconceivable that companies like Amazon, Ebay (who are fighting their own scraping battles) move the direction of sign in to visit more than a few pages.
This would mean that we'll all be forced to use accounts to see anything substantial within a site. And it'll be harder to view things across sites.
I know that this particular case is about scraping personal data, but I think it's a catalyst for many upcoming lawsuits that will broadly shift the internet in an undesirable direction
Make it look like it came from Enemy State of the week.
Everyone can maintain plausible deniability, and no one needs to get punished.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.838...
[2]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67896748/air-canada-v-l...
https://basecareer.co/
https://unlisted.careers/
It's an easy fix, just have the recruiters verify with an email every month, but they don't so it makes me think they either encourage it or they really don't care because they benefit somehow.