On Thursday, December 19, 2019, 07:36:59 PM PST, Razer wrote: jim bell wrote: > Data of more than 267 million Facebook users has been exposed online [1]https://mol.im/a/7811595 via [2]http://dailym.ai/android > > Jim Bell's comment: > Article refers to "an illegal process called scraping...". > I am not aware that "scraping" is illegal, or even wrong. > Jim Bell >FCC says passing it on or using the information for personal gain is, and there's no reason to scrape pages unless one of those two are operational. Document that. Somewhat to the contrary is: [3]https://blog.zwillgen.com/2019/09/11/ninth-circuit-rules-scrapin g-public-website-likely-not-cfaa-violation/ [partial quote follows] NINTH CIRCUIT RULES THAT SCRAPING A PUBLIC WEBSITE IS LIKELY NOT A CFAA VIOLATION Published On September 11, 2019 | By Marc Zwillinger, Stacey Brandenburg and Zach Lerner | [4]Alternative Data [5]Twitter [6]LinkedIn [7]Facebook [8]Reddit [9]Copy Link [10]Email [11]Print In the highly-anticipated decision in the [12]hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case, the Ninth Circuit upheld the preliminary injunction against LinkedIn, prohibiting it from barring hiQâs scraping of public profiles from its site. In so doing, the court held that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (âCFAAâ) is likely not violated by the scraping of publicly available data even after receipt of a cease-and-desist letter. Notwithstanding that this decision is not a full adjudication of the case â but rather a determination of whether hiQ has a likelihood of success on the merits and if the injunction is necessary to prevent irreparable harm â the courtâs analysis of the CFAA claims significantly extends a body of CFAA-related caselaw suggesting that the CFAA cannot be used to prevent webscraping of public content. Procedural Posture The Ninth Circuit did not decide the entire case on its merits. Rather, it only analyzed whether the preliminary injunction issued against LinkedIn should be affirmed. In so doing, it found that the balance of hardships tipped in hiQâs favorâunder the applicable legal standard, hiQ only had to demonstrate that it had raised âserious questions going to the meritsâ of the legal issues in the case. Thus, the opinion is not a final ruling on any of the described claims, and its treatment of the issues could still be revisited by the court after summary judgment or a trial on the merits if the case proceeds. Analysis of Decision The district court entered the injunction against LinkedIn after analyzing the four preliminary injunction factors. As part of this analysis, the district court found that hiQ was likely to have success on the merits of its state law claims that LinkedIn had tortiously interfered with hiQâs contracts by seeking to block it from accessing public profiles on the LinkedIn website. Such blocking was alleged to be a death knell to hiQâs business, preventing the company from collecting the data that fuels its operations and thus, causing it to violate its customer contracts. After finding that the district court had correctly concluded that LinkedIn likely knew of these contracts as well as hiQâs business expectations and may not have been within the realm of fair competition, the Ninth Circuit needed to determine if hiQâs conduct amounted to a CFAA violation. If it was, the CFAA would preempt all of hiQâs claims against LinkedIn and justify LinkedInâs steps to block hiQâs traffic. But, as described below, the Ninth Circuit found that the CFAA is unlikely to cover hiQâs scraping activities as applied to LinkedIn public profiles. CFAA Claim The court identified the pivotal CFAA question as âwhether once hiQ received LinkedInâs cease-and-desist letter, any further scraping and use of LinkedInâs data was âwithout authorizationâ within the meaning of the CFAA.â The court focused its analysis on the statuteâs original legislative purpose, stating the CFAA is âbest understood as an anti-intrusion statuteâ and âtherefore we look to whether the conduct at issue is analogous to âbreaking and enteringâ.â The court explained that the CFAA is âpremised on a distinction between information presumptively accessible to the public and information for which authorization is generally requiredâ¦.â Therefore, the court suggested that publicly available information does not require authorization to access in the first place and similarly cannot have such authorization revoked. The court also analogized to the concept of âwithout authorizationâ as used in the Stored Communications Act, where computer communication systems are generally divided into sites âaccessible to the general public,â and sites that are ânot visible to the public,â i.e. restricted or private. Restricted systems â like Facebook â require passwords or other credentials to access them. Accordingly, the court articulated three categories of computer information for purposes of the CFAA analysis: 1. Information for which access is open to the general public and permission is not required; 2. Information for which authorization is required and has been given; and 3. Information for which authorization is required and has not been given (or not given for the part of the system accessed). In the courtâs view, LinkedInâs public profiles fall into the first category, (whereas the court suggested, in dicta, that Facebookâs private profiles, which require the creation of username and passwords to access, would fall into the second or third category as the case may be). Computer information in the first category needs no authorization by the site owner to access, and therefore attempts to deny access under the CFAA through Terms of Service and/or cease-and-desist letters are ineffective. As such, â[i]t is likely that when a computer network generally permits public access to its data, a userâs accessing that publicly available data will not constitute access without authorization under the CFAA.â [end of partial quote] References 1. https://mol.im/a/7811595 2. http://dailym.ai/android 3. https://blog.zwillgen.com/2019/09/11/ninth-circuit-rules-scraping-public-website-likely-not-cfaa-violation/ 4. https://blog.zwillgen.com/category/alternative-data/ 5. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#twitter 6. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#linkedin 7. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#facebook 8. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#reddit 9. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#copy_link 10. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#email 11. https://blog.zwillgen.com/#print 12. http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17-16783.pdf