There is a broader ethical discussion of how to treat data, nominally public, that is increasingly collected, persisted and analyzed indefinitely by adversarial agents. It seems clear to me that a more nuanced categorization is required. This data is not public in the same sense as an uttered word was in a town square a hundred years ago.
Imagine being denied job opportunities because some company has analyzed the careers of the last 25 generations of your ancestors and deemed your lineage to be inadequate?
You mean maybe for your LinkedIn general profile info to be public, but not for the old profile data or the metadata of when your changed what to be public. It's not per se secret or hidden but it's also not intended to be kept and processed.
This is also a clear case where GDPR would come in. This is personal data, whether intentional or not, and the scraper is obliged to conform to EU laws if they scrape data on EU citizens - including eg information rights and deletion.
I don't agree to republish them. Just because they are publicly accessible on SiteA doesn't mean I have agreed to have them be published on SiteB does it?
That isn't what's really being ruled on here, though. Republishing the data is still restricted via copyright, but the data may exist in an internal database that SiteB uses to do X.
The question at hand is whether or not SiteB (or more appropriately CompanyB) is able to automatically download the content on SiteA or have to make an intern manually copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet.
There are privacy settings though, and recruiters used to be able to see more than other non-contacts. I'm not sure if that is still the case, but so what is being shared is not always exactly obvious to the user.
Imagine being denied job opportunities because some company has analyzed the careers of the last 25 generations of your ancestors and deemed your lineage to be inadequate?