Hacker News Reader

Comment by rangersanger | Hacker News Reader

I used to work on one of those extensions. The lengths linkedin goes to "protect" public data is kind of absurd. If they poured those resources into building tools for salespeople the site would be far more valuable. Or, they could reopen their now closed developer program. It has also been established by lawsuit that those extensions have a right to do what they do.

Those extensions would break the site far less frequently if linkedin would stop trying to break them. And, our users definitely knew when it was us breaking linkedin.

I'm not sure it's as much a catch 22 as it is a self inflicted wound.

View on HN

"public data"? I think you mean "my data"

It's data you made public by publishing it to LinkedIn, where default privacy settings is "anyone who can log into linkedin can view this content."

It gets complicated when you start thinking of things like blocking other accounts from viewing your profile, or adjusting visibility settings. Arguably LinkedIn has a duty to protect the integrity of their privacy controls, which would entail implementing anti-scraping measures.

> It's data you made public by publishing it to LinkedIn, where default privacy settings is "anyone who can log into linkedin can view this content."

... under specific terms of use that scraping technically violates.

There’s actually quite a bit of data that’s viewable to anyone, logged in or not, that’s public. All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. Sales people all across the world copy and paste data from LinkedIn to sales force every day. They either do it manually, using the app I worked on, or one of the literally hundreds of competitors.

So the argument is that you are abiding their days because other people are also doing it.... Great morality...

There's no moral issue here. Sales people are going in and copying and pasting data field by field, and we made that process more efficient. All that software did is replace multiple clicks with one. Scrape the DOM and dump it into their salesforce instance. A sales person still needs to initiate the action. I'm happy to admit that I don't like sales people, I don't like cold calls, and what we did made it slightly more efficient for them to cold call people. But calling it a/immoral or an invasion of privacy is silly, unless you've already established that cold calls are immoral and I missed that.

If you don't want your data scraped for collection, you wouldn't put it on Linkedin. Really the only argument is, is it more moral for Linkedin to do it instead of a plugin?

If there are literally hundreds of competitors why would we need you also being a jerk?

>All we did was speed up what was happening anyway.

I can think of a number of crimes where this statement is also true, so I'm not so certain it serves as an adequate defense.

I disagree with your implicit assumption that automated access is equivalent to a person viewing the data. Scale changes the results. Technology is making things possible at scales and economies that were not viable before, and people are slow to adjust.

It's one thing to have police stationed at a bus stop, waiting for a suspect to emerge. It's another to network facial recognition cameras across a city or country and log the motions of the entire population.

It's one thing to greet people in a grocery store and offer coupons for your product. It's another to (as discussed a couple days ago) install Bluetooth beacons in a variety of stores, install trojan packages in popular phone apps, and track people moving through stores.

It's one thing to browse LinkedIn for a person's profile, read the bio of an interesting candidate, and email them. It's another to slurp up 2000 candidates and send an email to all of them.

Just because personal data is public does not give the right to use it, at least not in Europe.

>It's data you made public

It's data you or someone else you know made public. Guilty by association?

This situation kind of falls into a grey area. The code in question is running locally in the web browser, most likely whether you have an account or not. If someone didn't create an account then they couldn't have agreed to allow this and most likely wouldn't have even been aware of this intrusive data mining script running in their browser. If there's nothing surreptitious or suspect about the code in question, why all the obfuscation and oddly specific legal clauses against "reverse engineering" LinkedIn's "source code", i.e. the script that's now running on my computer and/or device without my permission or knowledge. This all seems done in bad faith and exceeds a reasonable protection of a businesses intellectual property. I find it disconcerting that major corporations like LinkedIn get away with things that could have major legal repercussions if you or I did them.

We end users don't need this. I hope you got a more honest job.

There are millions of dollars of software sales that say otherwise.

And there are billions of dollars of arms sale saying we need wars?

Dollars aren't the best way of measuring usefulness. A lot of damage is caused by money.

It doesn't seem wrong to me that a salesperson would find your email on a business site so that they could sell to you. Cold contacts are annoying when your answer is no, but morally wrong? Just use a burner email for every public location.

okay, there are millions of users paying money directly to use the service. they clearly find utility in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com