LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data

A California federal judge on Thursday finalized an agreement between LinkedIn and two software companies — ProAPIs and its joint business operator Netswift — that requires the firms to stop scraping user data on a mass scale. The order closes a case LinkedIn first brought last October.

What the companies must do

Under the deal, the firms must stop selling and transferring the data they gathered, may no longer access LinkedIn through fake accounts, and must delete the scraped material, according to Sarah Wright, the LinkedIn senior executive who oversees litigation and enforcement. She called the outcome an important triumph in a post published on the platform the same day.

“Your profile is yours,” Wright wrote. “What you choose to share on LinkedIn is meant for the professional community you're building, not for an outside company to scrape and use in ways you never agreed to.”

A network of millions of fake accounts

LinkedIn sued the two companies and their CEO last October. According to the complaint, they built a massive network of bogus accounts — numbering in the millions — that scraped data on a constant basis. The targeted information included member, company and school profiles alongside member reactions, comments and posts.

The company routinely found and blocked the phony accounts within hours of their creation, the complaint said, but even in that short window the firms could scrape hundreds of profiles. They allegedly set up hundreds or even thousands of new accounts every day, which made it impossible for LinkedIn to stop the scraping.

ProAPIs responds

ProAPIs, which describes itself as a “data pipeline platform,” posted a comment on its website saying it “does not offer tools to scrape LinkedIn.” “ProAPIs has agreed to a consent judgment in United States federal court that it will cease scraping LinkedIn and will never scrape LinkedIn in the future,” the post said.

A long-running problem

Scraping of user profiles has been a persistent problem for the social platform. Five months ago, Wright celebrated another legal win against a firm that was allegedly distributing a browser extension used to harvest users' data without their consent.