Thinking about data some more…
The Supreme Court has declined to take LinkedIn’s case with Hiq Labs in a dispute about scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet. The high court has ordered the appeal’s court to hear the case again in light of its recent ruling. Pulling from Axios:
LinkedIn argues that upstart rival hiQ shouldn’t be able to scrape public profiles on its site to gather the vast amount of information it provides on people’s work history and other business-related data. A federal appeals had sided with hiQ, but Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court will send things back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Open questions about what is public information, what data brokers can do, and what mass scraping means are the debate here. We may not have a data privacy set of laws in the US… but we do in terms of case law. This will determine some of who owns that data and what’s public. That’s why we care.