For most people the dangers of openness (see Cambridge Analytica), the lack of upside and the lack of security in small players mean that walled gardens are the best solution for the majority of people.
This lawsuit is exactly why people trust walled gardens to keep their data walled off. Because I trusted LinkedIn, not ProAPI and whatever malicious actors they sell to.
You are free to leave and delete your data, unlike if everyone has access to it then it is out there in perpetuity.
You definitely can't sue a data broker to pay you/stop using your data.
Obviously LinkedIn is also in the business of selling the data about you, and also access to you.
LinkedIn just doesn't like this other company leeching off that data LinkedIn got about you, and then competing with LinkedIn in making money off that data (including access).
Not a 3rd party selling my information to a scam farm in a foreign land that has no laws that will use all of that information to extract money from my parents.
(edit: "my" data, as in the data I post there.)
Because LinkedIn is less effective than I'd like, I support 3rd parties scraping the data I posted there, again on the hope that they'd be more successful at marketing that data, which I would benefit from as the data is my resume.
Claude also had to a pay almost 1.5b for illegally training / scrapping.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/business/anthropic-ai-settlem...
Prediction: this will be a very much pay to play market
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)
Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here, but my bet is on having a deal with the big players, we allow you to scrape us (or we give you a pipe you can consume out of), and you pay us in monetary or non-monetary terms; like how many business exchanges work
If you want to make a big deal about this, tell us you at least sent a letter to the big players too. Otherwise, dont put up such a huge show
legal precedence => Surer victory in the future for similar lawsuits
And there's always a bigger fish.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/apple-sues-small-...
The dispute was settled because Pear agreed to slightly alter its logo, instead of continuing full litigation (maybe because of resources / dollars it would consume)
If they settle, or the case got dismissed -- no precedent is set.
Only way this is not beneficial is if software company settle or gets dismissed right away.
https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
I somehow want both parties to lose.
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.
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.
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.
I don't recall all of the specific details, but I just remember reading about it at the time and how they bypassed some of iOS security protections to do it. Adn that they didn't get perma-banned from the various app stores back then is beyond me. It's a huge part of why I avoid installing apps on my phone in general.
It was ~12 years ago, so there's not much left around, but here is an engineering blog post from Linkedin talking about how they architected it https://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing...
I don't recall all of the specific details, but I just remember reading about it at the time and how they bypassed some of iOS security protections to do it. Adn that they didn't get perma-banned from the various app stores back then is beyond me. It's a huge part of why I avoid installing apps on my phone in general.
I don't recall all of the specific details, but I just remember reading about it at the time and how they bypassed some of iOS security protections to do it. Adn that they didn't get perma-banned from the various app stores back then is beyond me. It's a huge part of why I avoid installing apps on my phone in general.
Oh man, a lot of the web really feels very enshittified these days.
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.
Most of what I wrote I have in my notes anyway — but still if they say it is my data and I can always download it, I really want to download it and not like that someone just puts up lies on their website like "data is yours you can always download it".
All the response was in the comment you try to ridicule.
https://deepnoodle.ai/research/linkedin-legal-battles-tos-vi...
or partner up to amplify that other use case
but I guess we are in the lawyers divide and conquer mentality these days
saltyoldman•4mo ago