LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data

A California federal judge on Thursday finalized a deal between LinkedIn and two software companies that requires the firms to stop scraping user data on a mass scale.

The agreement between LinkedIn, ProAPIs and joint business operator Netswift also requires the firms to stop selling and transferring the data, no longer access LinkedIn through fake accounts and delete the data that was scraped, according to a senior LinkedIn executive. 

Sarah Wright, who oversees litigation and enforcement for the tech giant, called the outcome an important triumph in a Thursday LinkedIn post.

“Your profile is yours,” Wright said. “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.”

LinkedIn sued the companies and their CEO last October, alleging in its complaint that the firms created a massive network of bogus accounts — numbering in the millions — that scraped the data on a constant basis. The targeted data included member, company and school information alongside member reactions, comments and posts.

The social media giant routinely found and blocked the phony accounts mere hours after they were created, the complaint said, but even in that short window the companies could scrape hundreds of profiles.

The software firms allegedly set up hundreds or even thousands of new accounts daily, the complaint said, making it impossible for LinkedIn to stop the scraping.

ProAPIs, which calls itself a “data pipeline platform,” posted a comment about the settlement 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.

Data scraping of user profiles has been a longtime problem for the social platform.

Five months ago, Wright celebrated a legal win against another firm that was allegedly distributing a browser extension used to scrape users’ data without their consent, according to a LinkedIn post at the time.