A California federal judge finalized an agreement on Thursday between LinkedIn and two software firms, ProAPIs and Netswift, that mandates an end to mass-scale scraping of user information from the platform. The settlement also prohibits the defendants from selling or transferring scraped data, using fake accounts to access LinkedIn, and requires deletion of all previously harvested information.
Sarah Wright, LinkedIn's head of litigation and enforcement, described the ruling as a significant victory in a post on the platform. "Your profile is yours," Wright said. "What you choose to share on LinkedIn is meant for the professional community you're building, not for an outside company to scrape and use in ways you never agreed to."
LinkedIn initiated legal action against the companies and their chief executive in October, claiming in court documents that they had constructed an extensive operation involving millions of fraudulent accounts designed to continuously harvest user data. The scraped information encompassed member profiles, company details, educational history, and user-generated content including reactions, comments and posts.
According to the lawsuit, LinkedIn's security systems identified and deactivated the unauthorized accounts within hours of creation, yet the companies managed to extract hundreds of profiles during that brief window. The defendants allegedly established hundreds or thousands of new accounts daily, rendering LinkedIn's blocking efforts ineffective.
ProAPIs, which describes itself as a "data pipeline platform," published a statement on its website regarding the settlement. "ProAPIs has agreed to a consent judgment in United States federal court that it will cease scraping LinkedIn and will never scrape LinkedIn in the future," the company stated. The firm also asserted that it "does not offer tools to scrape LinkedIn."
Unauthorized data extraction from LinkedIn user profiles represents an ongoing challenge for the platform. In a separate enforcement action five months prior, Wright announced another legal victory against a different company that had allegedly distributed a browser extension enabling unauthorized scraping of user information.
