On Monday, the US Supreme Court gave Microsoft Corp’s LinkedIn Corp another chance to prohibit competitor hiQ Labs Inc from mining personal data from the professional networking platform’s public profiles, a practise that LinkedIn claims jeopardises its users’ privacy.
A lower court ruling that banned LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available was overturned by the judges.
The question is whether businesses can utilise the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which forbids unauthorised access to a computer, to prevent competitors from harvesting or “scraping” enormous amounts of customer data from public-facing parts of a website.
In light of their June 4 ruling that limited the types of conduct that can be pursued criminally under the same law, the justices remanded the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to reconsider. In that case, the justices found that misusing information on a computer to which they have access does not constitute a violation of the law.
The LinkedIn case highlights the growing importance of personal data on the internet and organisations’ potential to profit from it, while also raising questions about who has control over and uses an individual’s data, and for what purpose.
hiQ was warned in 2017 by LinkedIn, which has over 750 million members, to stop scraping LinkedIn’s public profiles or face legal action under the anti-hacking law.
On its part, hiQ uses the data to creates products that analyse employee talents or notify companies when they could be seeking for a job. It said, LinkedIn had warned around the same time it unveiled a service identical to hiQ’s.
It filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging LinkedIn of anti-competitive conduct, and a federal judge granted its preliminary injunction against LinkedIn in 2017. HiQ has stated that public data must remain public, and that anti-competitive hoarding of public data by a small group of big firms should not inhibit innovation on the Internet.