LinkedIn—LinkedIn pursued multi-year legal battle against hiQ Labs over public data scraping
LinkedIn filed suit against hiQ Labs for scraping publicly available LinkedIn profile data. The landmark case reached the Supreme Court in 2021, which remanded it. The Ninth Circuit ruled scraping public data doesn't violate the CFAA. Ultimately LinkedIn won a $500,000 judgment in December 2022 on breach of contract and CFAA claims related to hiQ's use of fake accounts. The case established key precedents about platform control over publicly accessible data versus open internet principles.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Internet & Web Freedom | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| User Privacy | +toward | secondary | +0.50 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.221 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
LinkedIn v. hiQ Labs reached Supreme Court and ended with $500K judgment against hiQ
The multi-year legal battle between LinkedIn and hiQ Labs over data scraping reached the US Supreme Court in 2021. The Ninth Circuit ruled scraping public data does not violate the CFAA, but LinkedIn ultimately won a $500,000 judgment in December 2022 on breach of contract grounds and CFAA violations related to fake accounts. hiQ was permanently enjoined from scraping LinkedIn.