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LinkedIn may be less hypocritical than it first appears:

February 2022: LinkedIn sue Mantheos.

April 18, 2022: TechCrunch runs an article [0] stating that a U.S. appellate court affirms the legality of scraping publicly available data.

So IIUC, LinkedIn was consistently playing to the apparent law.

EDIT: oops, forgot the link!

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/



That gives rise to a decent conspiracy theory: LI sued to pave the road for LI themselves to scrape en masse.


I was working at a recruiting startup years ago and we got a cease & desist letter from LI asking us to stop crawling their public data.

Initially crawling them was very easy (we had ~100m profiles). With time crawling became harder and harder on the technical front. They obviously invested millions of $ in technology to stop being crawled.


Linkedin has always been a shitty company, so I bet they've been scraping the entire time.


[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/


Citation for TechCrunch article missing.




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