California district court declined to dismiss declaratory judgment action brought by data scraper, 3taps, Inc., against LinkedIn Corp. 3taps is seeking an order to clarify how federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act CFAA affects its permissions regarding LinkedIn data.
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
CPW has previously covered the state of play for data scraping litigation in the context of hiQ’s and LinkedIn’s ongoing dispute. For an update on this litigation, read on below.
As a reminder, data scraping is a mechanism of extracting data from websites (including websites not available to the public and accessible only to individuals with user accounts). The practices of Clearview which has been the subject of recent litigation are a prime example. Notwithstanding the clear privacy issues implicated by data scraping, there is no law specifically regulating this practice nationwide (although some state laws, as CPW has already covered, regulate the collection of biometric data). As such, in litigation regarding data scraping, parties are stuck arguing over the application of various statutes that were enacted long before data scraping was prevalent.