Security News

LinkedIn Secures Court Order to Stop Mass Data Scraping

The Record · 21 Sept 2026

Key Takeaway Small businesses using LinkedIn should review their privacy settings and be cautious about third-party tools or extensions that claim to enhance LinkedIn data access, as these may violate platform terms and expose data to unauthorised scraping.

A California federal judge has finalised a settlement between LinkedIn and software companies ProAPIs and Netswift, requiring them to stop scraping user data from LinkedIn profiles on a mass scale. The agreement also bars the firms from selling or transferring the scraped data, using fake accounts to access LinkedIn, and requires them to delete any data already collected.

LinkedIn sued the companies and their CEO last October, alleging they operated millions of fake accounts to continuously scrape member, company and school data, including comments, reactions and posts. According to LinkedIn's complaint, the network created hundreds or thousands of new fake accounts daily, allowing scraping to continue even though LinkedIn routinely detected and blocked the accounts within hours.

ProAPIs, which describes itself as a data pipeline platform, said in a statement it does not offer tools to scrape LinkedIn but has agreed to a consent judgment committing to never do so. LinkedIn has pursued similar action before, including a settlement five months earlier against a firm distributing a browser extension used to scrape user data without consent.

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Summarised by CISO AI from The Record. We link back to every original so you can read it yourself.