Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica and HiQ Labs’s LinkedIn scraping scandals. You may even have heard about Bidder’s Edge’s 1999 eBay scraping scandal.
LinkedIn vs. HiQ Labs case
Linkedin vs. HiQ Labs has become a landmark case in data scraping. Its significance will be felt across social networks. LinkedIn is a professional networking website that allows its users to build connections. At the same time, which is a data analytics startup that harvests information from public LinkedIn profiles to create data profiles.
The dispute between LinkedIn and hiQ Labs started when LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter to him. LinkedIn argued that hiQ’s data scraping activities violated the terms of their user agreement.
HiQ responded with a lawsuit against LinkedIn. HiQ claimed that LinkedIn illegally denied it access to public profiles. LinkedIn said that any further access to its data would violate state and federal law.
In the end, the district court granted hiQ’s motion for a preliminary injunction, but LinkedIn appealed. The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling, ruling that LinkedIn’s actions were not preempted by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
LinkedIn argued that hiQ could continue to collect information from users if the users deleted their profiles, thereby allowing hiQ to retrieve the data. LinkedIn pointed out that other companies were using data analytics without using LinkedIn. However, the court could not conclude that hiQ had the constitutional rights required under the California Constitution.
In the meantime, LinkedIn was prepared to pursue legal action against hiQ if it continued its actions. LinkedIn filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to reconsider the case.
Bidder’s Edge’s 1999 scraping of eBay
Using a website aggregator to harvest eBay data is not new, but it is not new in the legal sense. The aforementioned entrant was not the only one in this boat. The US Court of Appeals has already thrown out a request by LinkedIn to block the scraping of its data.
The eBay vs. Bidder’s Edge case is notable because the two companies had a previous relationship. In addition to the court ruling on Bidder’s Edge’s site, eBay and its erstwhile competitor settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Although the two companies have since drifted apart, the case is still fresh in the minds of eBay’s lawyers and its legal personnel. The two firms have agreed on one key issue: eBay is entitled to a free year of service to the aforementioned company, which the court has deemed necessary to avoid a court battle. This paves the way for a new era of cooperation between the two firms. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether Bidder’s Edge will heed the call. This article discusses the legal and ethical considerations. It also examines the myriad of web scraping and aggregators. It is also important to note that while eBay is free to scrape data from its own site, it has no license to do so from competitors.
Cambridge Analytica vs. Facebook
During the past year, we’ve witnessed an enormous scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, Donald Trump’s campaign, and the Brexit referendum. These scandals are part of a larger trend referred to as surveillance capitalism, whereby the data gathered from a person’s life is aggregated and then used to infer detailed profiles of that person.
Cambridge Analytica, which is a part of Robert Mercer’s Emerdata hedge fund, was able to harvest tens of millions of Facebook profiles from the social network using a technique called web scraping. The company matched profiles to electoral rolls to target individual voters with political messages. The company claimed to be able to determine personality types.
Cambridge Analytica worked with Donald Trump’s election campaign and the winning Brexit campaign, helping to win voters over to the cause. It acquired 50 million Facebook profiles, including data from 87 million Americans. It built an algorithm to analyze profiles and claimed it could micro-target messages that would resonate with particular groups of voters.
The company also said it used data from friends to build a personality test called “thisisyourdigitallife”. This app was paid for by 270,000 people and scraped their Facebook profiles to determine which personality traits would be correlated with their voting behavior.
This information was also used to build a database of psychographic profiles that would allow political campaigns to determine which messages were likely to resonate with certain voters. The data was then sold to other companies.
