Reasons Behind Scraping LinkedIn Data

The water can become a little bad here. LinkedIn officially opposes data scraping and actively discourages scrapers from using the platform in order to preserve user data and prevent the space from becoming overrun with negative actors.

Scraping public data from the platform is, however, perfectly lawful. Indeed, LinkedIn lost a Supreme Court dispute in 2019 against hiQ Labs, a San Francisco-based firm.

HiQ Labs requested an injunction against LinkedIn because the company barred them from scraping data for research purposes. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sustained the injunction.

They basically said that persons who make data publicly available on a social media site don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that data scraping didn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights.

This established a precedent that scraping publicly available user data does not violate the platform’s terms of service, and hence will not get you in trouble.