US Supreme Court to Reinstate LinkedIn’s efforts to Protect Personal Data

US Supreme Court to Reinstate LinkedIn’s efforts to Protect Personal Data

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court granted LinkedIn Corp., a subsidiary of Microsoft Corp., another opportunity to try to prevent rival hiQ Labs Inc from harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles - a practice that LinkedIn claims threatens the privacy of its users.

According to the judges, a lower court judgment that prevented LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available was overturned. Whether companies can use a federal anti-hacking law known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, to prevent competitors from harvesting or "scraping" vast amounts of customer data from publicly accessible parts of a website, is at the heart of this dispute.

The Supreme Court sent the case back to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco for reconsideration in light of its June 4 judgment that restricted the types of behaviour that can be punished criminally under the same legislation. In that instance, the judges determined that a person who misuses information on a computer to which they have been granted access is not guilty of breaking the law.

Personal data on the internet is becoming increasingly important, and businesses are increasingly able to benefit from it. However, the LinkedIn case raises issues about who has control over and uses an individual's data - and for what purpose - on the internet. LinkedIn, which has more than 750 million members, warned hiQ in 2017 that it would be subject to punishment under the anti-hacking legislation if it continued to scrape LinkedIn's public profile data. HiQ, on the other hand, utilizes the information to develop solutions that assess employee abilities or warn companies when employees may be searching for a new position. LinkedIn, according to the report, made the warning around the same time the company introduced a service comparable to hiQ's.

It filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn in federal court, accusing the company of anti-competitive behaviour, and a federal judge granted the company's request for a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn in 2017. HiQ has stated that data must stay public and that the internet's ability to innovate should not be hindered by the anti-competitive hoarding of public data by a small group of strong corporations. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019 prevented LinkedIn from shutting down hiQ while the case was ongoing, saying that the legislation at issue most likely did not apply in instances where no consent was required to access data that users had made publicly available.

HiQ's software bots, according to LinkedIn, may gather data on a vast scale, well beyond what any human might accomplish while reading public profiles, the company said in its filing with the Supreme Court.