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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

I want to be able to use LinkedIn to network with colleagues and people in my industry. If someone wants to scrape my profile to make a report on industry trends, I’m fine with it. What I don’t want is hiQ vacuuming up my data so they can snitch to my employer if they think I’m job hunting.

How is this a paradox? Tech — the web in particular — is supposed to be an equalizing force, but HiQ is clearly trying to give my employer more power over me. We are an industry that prides itself on solving difficult problems — how is our response here to just throw up our hands and say “it’s all or nothing”?

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Wow, I just looked up what hiQ does and have to say it's pretty scummy in my opinion. Why do people create stuff like this? Don't they know it will likely come back to bite them one day?

For reference:

"There is more information about your employees outside the walls of your organization than inside it. hiQ curates and leverages this public data to drive employee-positive actions.

Our machine learning-based SaaS platform provides flight risks and skill footprints of enterprise organizations, allowing HR teams to make better, more reliable people decisions."

The thing is, GDPR has theoretically solved this in the EU. The UK's ICO is about to publish guidance prohibiting scraping public user information for marketing (where the user would not expect it to be used for that).

It's a really easy solution, because companies need to prove how they got your data when asked.

When you track the source of the mailing list you're getting spam from and they say "We scraped it from LinkedIn", they get fined.

We haven't solved that in the same way we haven't "solved" encryption not having a magical good people only door despite spook tantrums. There fundamentally isn't a possible mechanism and really wanting it doesn't change that.

It is a result of equality - not of outcome but rules. Open for everyone but those whose applications you don't like isn't open. On a technical level trying to prevent it is like the "evil bit" as a solution to malware.

Of course there are possible mechanisms. There are heuristics to detect bots. The whole reason for this lawsuit is that LinkedIn blocked hiQ from scraping their website.

I'm also not necessarily talking about a technical defense against unwanted scraping. Write a law makes it illegal to do something like "scraping personally identifiable information and storing or presenting it non–anonymized", and prosecute companies who break it. I'm sure there are loopholes in that particular example, but the point is we can absolutely add shades of gray here.

> Open for everyone but those whose applications you don't like isn't open.

Openness should be a means, not an end. If we make something "not open" but it prevents 95% of undesirable uses and only 5% of desirable ones, is that not a tradeoff worth discussing?

>Tech — the web in particular — is supposed to be an equalizing force

Don't take the Google PR so seriously, the tech industry wants to make money like every other industry.

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