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I agree with this, but I feel like I've also seen the EFF and similar advocates cry foul when companies or governments use tools to mass monitor publicly visible user information on the internet. Genuinely asking: Is there a discernible difference between scraping LinkedIn data in this instance vs. scraping Twitter data about protests or threats against politicians?

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Yes: power held by the involved parties. A small company or a person scraping data from LinkedIn usually has no power over LinkedIn or people it's collecting data about. Government collecting data about protesters wields whole sophisticated enforcement apparatus and can do virtually anything to any and all protesters.

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