LinkedIn Brings John Doe Claim Against Scrapers

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. 

Florida Legislator Looks to Restrict Employer Access to Employee Social Media Accounts

Florida, a state that is generally considered to be friendly to employers will be taking steps to protect employee and prospective employee privacy if a South Florida State Senator has his way.

Florida State Senator, Jeff Clemens of Lake Worth, wants Florida to join the growing list of states that restrict employer access to employee or prospective employee social media accounts.  The proposed bill defines a social media account as “an interactive account or profile that an individual establishes and uses through an electronic application, service, or platform used to generate or store content, including, but not limited to, videos, still photographs, blogs, video blogs, instant messages, audio recordings, or e-mail that is not available to the general public.”  The bill would restrict employers from doing the following:

(a) Requesting or requiring that an employee or prospective employee disclose a username, password, or other means of access to a social media account through an electronic communications device;

(b) Requesting or requiring an employee or prospective employee take action that allows the employer to gain access to the employee’s or prospective employee’s social media account if the account’s contents are not available to the general public;

(c)  Retaliating against an employee for refusing to give the employer access to the social media account; and

(d)  Failing or refusing to hire a prospective employee as a result of a prospective employee’s refusal to allow the employer access to the prospective employee’s social media account.

Thirty-six states have already taken similar action with 11 already enacting statutes including California, Michigan, Maryland and Colorado. Some, including New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, have questioned the broad scope of such laws. Nevertheless, Governor Christie did recently sign such legislation into law, which takes effect December 1^st of this year.  See States Continue to Enact Privacy Laws Protecting Employees from Employers.

The proposed Florida bill would enable an employee or prospective employee to bring a civil action against the employer within two years after the violation and also provides for the seeking of injunctive relief.  If the Florida bill is passed in its current form it would take effect on October 1^st of next year.