The Microsoft-owned platform LinkedIn has once again secured another victory by defeating San Francisco-based hiQ Labs in a 6 years old court case.
LinkedIn has been facing hiQ Lab for the last 6 years, as hiQ Lab has been accused of scraping data from the users present on LinkedIn's platform. Recently, the district court for Northern California gave its verdict in favor of LinkedIn. The decision was ruled by Judge Edward Chen, who shared his remarks by stating that hiQ was dependent on LinkedIn, as the lab used the company’s data by extracting it from the public user profiles with the means of a data scraping software tool. The accused company has been trying to avoid the technical defense system of LinkedIn for the last six years. HiQ even tried to perform reverse engineering on a professional network to save itself from being detected by initiating the site access behavior.
Not only this, but the accused company also took help from Turkers, who work as contractors for such actions. Turkers were asked to perform quality assurance tests.
Though the operation carried out by HiQ was slowed down four years ago, the server kept running for another year and kept extracting user data. The judge further added that the accused company was found guilty of breaking LinkedIn’s agreement as hiQ was using LinkedIn by creating fake accounts, and with their help, they stole the data.
At the start of 2022, LinkedIn faced another company in court. The Singaporean company, Mantheos, was also accused of the same thing as HiQ Labs, and LinkedIn won that case too.
According to Sarah Wight, the litigation head, the court's verdict holds an important place for the company and its users. It is accepted that the use of such data goes against the guidelines, and based on this, it was decided that HiQ was using fraudulent methods to steal data and use it for its purposes. With such a decision, it is easy for the platform to provide security to those who use this service, as it protects the company from having its data stolen in the future. LinkedIn is investing in measures that can prevent the platform from being used by such companies.
Read next: 21% of Paid Ad Traffic Comes From Bots According to This Study
LinkedIn has been facing hiQ Lab for the last 6 years, as hiQ Lab has been accused of scraping data from the users present on LinkedIn's platform. Recently, the district court for Northern California gave its verdict in favor of LinkedIn. The decision was ruled by Judge Edward Chen, who shared his remarks by stating that hiQ was dependent on LinkedIn, as the lab used the company’s data by extracting it from the public user profiles with the means of a data scraping software tool. The accused company has been trying to avoid the technical defense system of LinkedIn for the last six years. HiQ even tried to perform reverse engineering on a professional network to save itself from being detected by initiating the site access behavior.
Not only this, but the accused company also took help from Turkers, who work as contractors for such actions. Turkers were asked to perform quality assurance tests.
Though the operation carried out by HiQ was slowed down four years ago, the server kept running for another year and kept extracting user data. The judge further added that the accused company was found guilty of breaking LinkedIn’s agreement as hiQ was using LinkedIn by creating fake accounts, and with their help, they stole the data.
At the start of 2022, LinkedIn faced another company in court. The Singaporean company, Mantheos, was also accused of the same thing as HiQ Labs, and LinkedIn won that case too.
According to Sarah Wight, the litigation head, the court's verdict holds an important place for the company and its users. It is accepted that the use of such data goes against the guidelines, and based on this, it was decided that HiQ was using fraudulent methods to steal data and use it for its purposes. With such a decision, it is easy for the platform to provide security to those who use this service, as it protects the company from having its data stolen in the future. LinkedIn is investing in measures that can prevent the platform from being used by such companies.
Read next: 21% of Paid Ad Traffic Comes From Bots According to This Study
