Scraping public website data does not violate CFAA, judge rules
Scraping public data from a website without the website’s authorization is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a U.S. federal court ruled Monday, limiting a U.S. anti-hacking law that academics have criticized for allowing broad legal action against innocuous activity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday refused to overturn a preliminary injunction that required professional networking site LinkedIn to allow talent management startup hiQ Labs to gather data from users’ public profiles. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn had installed technical safeguards to stop hiQ from sweeping up data on members until a court in 2017 ordered LinkedIn to stop blocking that automated collection. LinkedIn appealed, alleging hiQ had broken CFAA, among other things, by using LinkedIn data in a way LinkedIn did not intend. “LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its users, as the users retain ownership over their […]
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