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After being threaten by LinkedIn: "LinkedIn told hiQ in 2017 to stop scraping LinkedIn's public profiles or face liability under the anti-hacking law."

I think it's fair to say LinkedIn is the instigator in this case.

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That seems like it would have been a breathtakingly easy problem to solve using technical means instead of legal threats. They could've required logins to view profile information. They could have blacklisted any IP address exhibiting automated behavior.

That sort of 'solution' is just a game of technical whack-a-mole as one party finds a new way to scrape the data and the other finds a new way to stop them though. If you want to permanently stop scrapping you need a non-technical solution that stops someone even trying.

But thats exactly the issue here. If they find a way to limit the data such that they can split who is "authorized" and who is not, then they have found something that falls under the now new reading of cfaa.

It's not going to stop scrapers from entities outside of the jurisdiction of the US legal system, but it's going to end up icing companies in the US who do this.

But I think Microsoft/Linked In is going to have a very difficult time redefining authorized when the data is publicly available to anonymous access.

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