LinkedIn sues software company allegedly scraping data from millions of profiles

Social media giant LinkedIn on Thursday filed a lawsuit against a company which it says operates a network of millions of fake accounts used to scrape data from LinkedIn members before selling the information to third parties without permission.

ProAPIs, a software company, and its CEO Rahmat Alam allegedly run an operation which LinkedIn says charges customers up to $15,000 per month for scraped user data taken from the social media platform.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, companies which scrape user data at scale are proliferating and are increasingly undermining consumer privacy.

Data scraped by ProAPIs allegedly includes LinkedIn member information as well as their posts, reactions and comments, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in a Northern California federal court.

“Defendants’ industrial-scale fake account mill scrapes member information that real people have posted on LinkedIn, including data that is only available behind LinkedIn’s password wall and that Defendants’ customers may not otherwise be allowed to access, and certainly are not allowed to copy and keep in perpetuity,” the lawsuit says. 

ProAPIs did not respond to a request for comment. Creating fake accounts is against LinkedIn’s terms of service. 

The lawsuit says that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn routinely detects ProAPIs’ scraping within hours of it beginning, but because the software firm creates “hundreds if not thousands” of fake accounts daily it is impossible to stop all of the activity.

ProAPIs uses LinkedIn’s trademark to promote its product, according to the lawsuit, which says the copyright abuse falsely suggests that the company is endorsed by the social network.