LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for
the Northern District of California claiming that bots have been used to impermissibly
scrape data from the profiles of hundreds of thousands of users. Thousands of
fake accounts were created with the objective of using the bots to collect
information from the profiles of legitimate accounts. While LinkedIn claims to
have traced the accounts to an Amazon Web Services account, the identity of the
actual culprits is still undetermined leading the social media site to identify
the defendants as “The Doe Defendants.”
“Bots” refers to automated software applications that
execute tasks over the Internet. “Scraping”
refers to the extraction of information from websites and is often restricted
by a site’s terms of use, including LinkedIn’s.
Three important issues tied to the scraping include (i) the
mere fact that the information was collected by parties who have not signed on
to LinkedIn’s terms and conditions, (ii) determining how the scraped
information will ultimately be used; and (iii) the impact on the integrity of
LinkedIn’s profiles if many are found to be fake. Moreover, in an InformationWeek article,
LinkedIn’s concern with the degrading of its LinkedIn Recruiter services is
noted.
LinkedIn is currently seeking the names of the owners of the
fake accounts from Amazon.
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