A Biggest Dispute On LinkedIn Scraping Legality

If you’re connected with the term ‘LinkedIn Scraping’ anyhow, then you must come across a question – Is LinkedIn Scraping legal or illegal? Okay, so let’s discuss it. If you look closely, you will find out that in this digital age of technology the biggest asset of any business is Data! Even the top giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon are ruling because of the vast amount of data they hold. And what if someone extracts all this data from LinkedIn within a few minutes? Yes, this is where LinkedIn Scraping comes in.

What Is LinkedIn Scraping?

LinkedIn Scraping is the process of automatically extracting data and particular information from LinkedIn profiles using software or script. The extracted information can be stored in various formats like CSV, Excel, and Text files. There are a number of LinkedIn scraping tools out there to perform the task and various languages too, having libraries that support LinkedIn data scraping.

Is LinkedIn Scraping Legal?

Okay, so get back to the point from where we started – Is it legal to do LinkedIn Scraping or not? However, doing data scraping from LinkedIn is technically not any kind of illegal process. But the decision is based on further various factors. How do you use the extracted LinkedIn data? or Are you violating the ‘Terms & Conditions’ statements of LinkedIn? etc. Let us take an example, Suppose you allow someone to enter your home from Main Door in general, But the person is preferred to come over by crossing Boundary Wall.

So, will you allow the person to enter your home? Similarly, the data displayed by LinkedIn is generally accessible to the public as it is legal to store that data in your system for personal use. LinkedIn also provides an option to export this data in a PDF file for the user. But in case you are trying to scrape data from LinkedIn by violating the ‘Terms & Conditions’ Guidelines, here it will be treated as illegal. However, the law regarding LinkedIn Scraping is not transparent but there are still some regulations in which you can fall for doing unauthorized LinkedIn data scraping. Some of these are listed below:

Copyright Violation

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

Breach of Contract

Copyright Infringement

Trespassing, etc.

HIQ VS LinkedIn – The Biggest Issue On Web Scraping Legality

You can say ‘LinkedIn vs HiQ’ is one of the biggest legal disputes about data scraping from LinkedIn. HiQ is a data analytics firm that is trying to scrape data from LinkedIn. LinkedIn sent an official letter to HiQ demanding it stops scraping the data from the LinkedIn site. But HIQ fired a case against LinkedIn as they stated that the data of LinkedIn is accessible to anyone who visits it and there is nothing false in scraping the publicly available data from LinkedIn.

However, the final decision was in the favor of HIQ as the court banned the company from blocking HiQ’s requests to scrape data from publicly available profiles on the platform. This case decision shows that scraping publicly available data from a website is not a legal Process. Okay, after getting to the point whether doing LinkedIn Scraping is legal or illegal depends upon how you perform the scraping and how you use the data. Now, take a look at those strategies which you should follow while doing LinkedIn Web Scraping –

Cautions For Data Scraping From LinkedIn

1. In the case of provided API, try to avoid Web Scraping
2. Avoid scraping data continuously, and take a break after 15 to 20 minutes.
3. Don’t use the scraped data for commercial purposes without the consent of the original owner.
4. Always go through the Terms of Service and follow the policies.
5. If someone has made his/her data private on a social media platform, it will be good to ask for permission from them before going further.

From all the above discussion, it can be concluded that data extracting from LinkedIn is actually not illegal on its own but one should be ethical while doing it. If done in a good way, LinkedIn data Scraping can help us to make the best use of the web. The biggest example of this is Google Search Engine. So, do not give any reason to the target site owner to block or even sue you for any wrongdoings and respect the Terms of Service (ToS) of LinkedIn as well.

LinkedIn Recruiter Scraper – A Best LinkedIn Scraping Tool

LinkedIn Recruiter Extractor is a desktop application designed to extract emails, phone numbers, skills, social media links, website links, and much more from LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter profiles. Data can be found on LinkedIn by name, zip code, profile URL, job title, skills, and much more by using this LinkedIn scraping tool.

LinkedIn Contact Extractor finds and extracts data from LinkedIn and LinkedIn profiles automatically and saves the extracted data to a necessary file format, for example, Excel, CSV, or Text file. You can use this extracted LinkedIn for marketing, recruiting, lead generation, and other business strategies.

Wrap Up:

In short, LinkedIn Recruiter Profile Scraper is a powerful and legal tool to find and extract contact information from LinkedIn. LinkedIn Scraping can be beneficial for any business to grow fast.

In the end, data collection from LinkedIn with the LinkedIn Recruiter Extractor is a completely legal process. Because it extracts only publicly available data from LinkedIn and LinkedIn Recruiter.