Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lizdax 1837 days ago
Curious to see which direction the Supreme court goes with this -- given the last CFAA ruling.

>LinkedIn told the Supreme Court that hiQ's software "bots" can harvest data on a massive scale, far beyond what any individual person could do when viewing public profiles.

So can anyone with a couple thousand dollars to burn. By barring US companies from doing it all you're going to do is move the work to another country that doesn't care about US Law. The data will still be scrapped nonetheless.

2 comments

>LinkedIn told the Supreme Court that hiQ's software "bots" can harvest data on a massive scale, far beyond what any individual person could do when viewing public profiles.

That doesn't seem any different than when I registered a new business in my state. I did that online, and before I received the printed, mailed confirmation from the state I was getting credit card offers in the mail addressed to the business. I'm not glad how that played out, but I don't see any difference with hiQ collecting public information.

Secretary of State / corporate information is often sold in bulk without any need for scraping without authorization.

> Daily Filing Update – a file that includes all of the database updates for a specific day. Customers frequently begin by purchasing a Master Unload in order to create a database, and then subscribe to the Daily Filing Update so that they can download and update their databases on a daily basis to keep their data current with that maintained on the SOS BEST database.[0]

[0] https://direct.sos.state.tx.us/help/help-corp.asp?pg=bulk

Typo quibble: the data will still be scraped - if it was scrapped it wouldn't be an issue!