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LinkedIn wins court order blocking mass scraping of user data

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A California federal judge finalized a consent judgment requiring ProAPIs and joint operator Netswift to stop mass scraping of LinkedIn user data, delete any data already harvested, cease selling or transferring that data, and stop accessing the service with fake accounts. LinkedIn sued the companies and their CEO last October, alleging the firms built a vast and continuously refreshed network of bogus accounts that harvested member profiles, company and school information, reactions, comments and posts. LinkedIn’s enforcement lead framed the outcome as protecting users’ profiles from third-party harvesting and unauthorized use.

Court filings describe how the defendants created millions of phony accounts and spun up hundreds to thousands of new accounts daily so that, even though LinkedIn routinely detected and disabled fakes within hours, the firms could scrape hundreds of profiles in each brief window. ProAPIs posted that it does not offer LinkedIn-scraping tools and confirmed it agreed to the federal consent judgment promising never to scrape LinkedIn again. The order follows prior successful legal actions by LinkedIn against other scraping operations and extensions, reinforcing the company’s legal strategy to curb large-scale, unauthorized data collection.

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