[MathiasPius]

All illegal or unethical means can be explained, but not justified, by their ends.

I'm quite sure having unfettered insight into the browser environments of your users makes enforcing your Terms of Service much easier, but held against the (even minute) risk of exposing one of users' political, religious or sexual preferences, any of which might carry with it massive risk of bodily injury or death in many parts of the globe? I'm sorry but ToS enforcement does not even begin to clear that bar.

If you don't want your users to scrape large parts your website, have you considered just blocking users with outsized traffic usage and not violating their privacy in the process?

Justifying this invasion of privacy as a means of defending LinkedIn against the apparently existential threat posed by something as pedestrian as scraping is especially ridiculous when considering how LinkedIn managed to even get off the ground in the first place: By invading the privacy of its unwitting users by scraping their contacts and impersonating them via email[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn#Use_of_e-mail_account...

[magicalhippo]

Why is scraping even an issue? If people don't want others to find this info, just don't put it out there in the public?

[jwally]

The world isn't binary. People want to look for jobs and network.

At the same time they don't want their data turned over and sold to the kind of people who scrape LinkedIn.

Plus - Your data is LinkedIn's cash cow. They're not going to leave it out for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to export en masse whenever they want.