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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

If you have to login to access the data, that data isn't publicly available, and unlikely to be protected by this decision.

Page 31 of the filing specifically differentiates this case from one regarding Facebook:

"While Power Ventures was gathering user data that was protected by Facebook’s username and password authentication system, the data hiQ was scraping was available to anyone with a web browser."

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The ol' DMCA trivial encryption switcharoo. I'd expect a lot more sites and their data to require a login now, to the detriment of the data being publicly indexed.

Wait, doesn't Linkedin have pretty strong authentication safeuguards to view user profiles. if you google someone and click their linkedin without being logged in to LinkedIn, you're always directed to sign up or log in to it.

Twitter is the only example I can think of among the large social media sites that doesn't require you to be logged in to see profiles

Even twitter requires you to be logged in to view "replies" on a user's profile.

Nope. You can see public profiles without being logged in. Certainly the case here in the UK; not sure about elsewhere.

It's not authentication safeguards, it's dark UX patterns driving you to signup. Whether or not you'll see someone's profile and how much of it you'll see depends on how they fingerprint you, where you navigate from, and on the phase of the Moon. LinkedIn is notorious for that.

My memory might be misleading me here, but I think I remember years ago in one case I could see less info about a profile when logged in to my account than I could see while logged out and navigating from a Google search...

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