U.S. Supreme Court revives LinkedIn bid to shield personal data

June 14 - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave Microsoft Corp's LinkedIn Corp another chance to try to stop rival hiQ Labs Inc from harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles - a practice that LinkedIn contends threatens the privacy of its users. The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had barred LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to the information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available. The LinkedIn case underscores the increasing importance of personal data on the internet and the ability of companies to profit from that information, while raising questions over who can control and use an individual's data - and for what purpose. It said LinkedIn issued the threat around the same time LinkedIn announced a similar service to hiQ's. The 9th Circuit in 2019 blocked LinkedIn from cutting off hiQ while the litigation continued, ruling that the law at issue likely does not apply in situations in which no authorization is needed to access the data that users have made publicly available. LinkedIn told the Supreme Court that hiQ's software "Bots" can harvest data on a massive scale, far beyond what any individual person could do when viewing public profiles. LinkedIn in April said that some of the publicly viewable data of its users had been scraped and posted for sale.