LinkedIn Granted New Opportunity to Restrict Data-Scraping in its App

In a case that could have major implications for data security in social apps, the US Supreme Court has dismissed a lower court ruling which had previously barred LinkedIn from denying recruitment software company hiQ access to information which LinkedIn members had made publicly available in its app.

The case is a precedent-setting example in the battle against data scraping. Back in 2017, LinkedIn sought to cut off hiQ Labs from its service after discovering that hiQ had been scraping LinkedIn user data – harvesting personal information on publicly available profiles of LinkedIn users – in order to build its own recruitment information service.

It’s an important case, not just for LinkedIn, but for social media platforms in general. Last year, Facebook also launched legal proceedings against two companies over similar data scraping, through which these organizations were found to be extracting Facebook user data for use in their own digital intelligence tools.

It’ll be an important case to note, which could have significant implications on how social platforms operate moving forward, including potential restrictions on what data is made available to the non-user public.