US appeals court rules company may scrap data on LinkedIn public profiles

A federal appeals court has affirmed the right of HiQ Labs, a Californian startup, to collect information from LinkedIn’s public profiles. According to CBS, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Michigan upheld a previous ruling Monday siding with the company that analyzes workforce data scraped from profiles. LinkedIn suggested evaluating options for an appeal. According to an expert, this ruling “doesn’t establish that scraping websites is completely legal, but it goes a long way toward establishing that it’s not a federal crime”.