US court says web scraping is officially legal

Date:
Tue, 19 Apr 2022 12:25:43 +0000

Description:
Gathering publicly available data en masse does not constitute as hacking, court rules.

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Scraping public data is legal, the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals has ruled in a potentially landmark decision.

The decision follows a ruling by a federal court of appeals that reaffirmed its earlier decision, notably that web scraping (data harvesting, en masse)
of data thats made available to the general public, does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The CFAA is used to determine what can be described as hacking under US law.

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The ruling is the epilogue of a legal battle between LinkedIn and hiQ Labs, a talent management algorithm focused on people analytics and data science machine learning. The latter has been scraping LinkedIn user profiles, something the worlds largest social network for professionals described as against its terms of service, equal to hacking, and was in violation of the CFAA.

LinkedIn lost the first lawsuit in 2019, but even after the second knockdown, it doesnt want to give up.

Were disappointed in the courts decision. This is a preliminary ruling and
the case is far from over, said LinkedIn spokesperson Greg Snapper in a statement.

We will continue to fight to protect our members ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn. When your data is taken without permission and used in ways you havent agreed to, thats not okay. On
LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, which is why we prohibit unauthorized scraping on our platform. Read more

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Reporting on the news, TechCrunch gives it a positive spin, saying the ruling is good news for archivists, academics, researchers, and journalists.

Without a ruling in place, long-running projects to archive websites no
longer online and using publicly accessible data for academic and research studies have been left in legal limbo, it says.

However, it also reminds that some companies use of web scraping, such as the one done by facial recognition startup Clearview AI, is borderline illegal. This company scrapped billions of social media profile photos, over the
years. Keep your data safe and anonymous online with the best VPN services

Via: TechCrunch



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/us-court-says-web-scraping-is-officially-legal/


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