Security News > 2021 > June > Microsoft Gets Second Shot at Banning hiQ from Scraping LinkedIn User Data
The U.S. Supreme Court has granted LinkedIn another legal option to try to prevent rival hiQ Labs from scraping public information from its user profiles, something the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform has claimed is a violation of user privacy and a misuse of its data.
The decision effectively vacates a 2019 ruling by the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals barring LinkedIn from prohibiting hiQ access to publicly available information of LinkedIn's users, bouncing the case back to the lower court to hear again.
HiQ Labs' business model is based on using data science to create analytics tools that help companies make decisions regarding how to retain and train employees.
HiQ sued LinkedIn in 2017 for anti-competitive behavior after the company made a cease-and-desist effort against HiQ to force it to stop data scraping.
Though it is appears that giving LinkedIn another chance to argue its case could be a reversal of opinion about the scope of the CFAA, it could actually be a case of the court making a difference between the act of one single person versus the power of bots that companies like hiQ Labs use to scrape data at a much higher volume than any humans can do, said one expert.
"The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow LinkedIn Corp another chance to try to stop rival hiQ Labs Inc from harvesting personal user data from its platform is a groundbreaking case in the growing and evolving debate surrounding automated bot activity," observed Edward Roberts, director of strategy for Application Security at Imperva, in an e-mail to Threatpost.