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<b><i>Online Extra:</b></i> LinkedIn Takes Aim at Fake Profiles Designed to Scrape Data
LinkedIn is seeking to unmask the creators of fake profiles who have been scraping the professional social networking site for data about its 400 million users.
In a complaint'filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Aug. 8, LinkedIn claims that the defendants have used 'a highly coordinated and automated network of computers' to evade technical barriers the company uses to prevent fake profiles and data scraping. LinkedIn's lawyers at Munger, Tolles & Olson are seeking an injunction barring the unnamed defendants from accessing LinkedIn servers and exploiting the company's data. The suit also seeks an undisclosed amount of damages from the John Doe defendants.
Jonathan Blavin of Munger Tolles directed a request for commment to the company.
'We're a members-first organization and we feel we have a responsibility to protect the control that our members have over the information they put on LinkedIn,' a spokeswoman for the company said in an emailed statement. The'statement echoed exactly'the company's words from two years ago when its lawyers at Munger Tolles filed a similar suit against defendants who used information scraped from the site in attempts to compete with LinkedIn's Recruiter product, a premium service for headhunters seeking to locate and recruit candidates.
The earlier suit resulted in the defendants ' Robocog Inc. and Shon Burton ' being identified. Burton and Robocog'entered a consent judgment'with LinkedIn in July 2014 in which they agreed to be barred from using the site commercially and to pay the company $40,000.
The lawsuit, like the earlier one, brings claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) ' a federal statute recently bolstered by two Ninth Circuit decisions.
In July, a divided Ninth Circuit panel'upheld the criminal conviction'of former Korn/Ferry International executive recruiter David Nosal under the federal anti-hacking statute. Later that month, in a decision that could strengthen LinkedIn's CFAA claims, the court found that a defunct socialmedia aggregator'violated the anti-hacking law'by accessing Facebook servers and scraping data from user profiles after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the social media giant.
Ross Todd writes for The Recorder, an ALM sibling of Entertainment Law & Finance. He can be reached at [email protected]. On Twitter: Todd_Ross
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