"Rehmat Alam operates from the mountains of northern Pakistan, according to one of his online profiles. There, he flaunts his talent for harvesting LinkedIn data and advises YouTube viewers how to earn money off the internet. His company, ProAPIs, allegedly boasted in marketing materials that its software can handle hundreds of requests per second to scrape profiles, selling the underlying data for thousands of dollars a month."
"In October, the social media giant owned by Microsoft sued Rehmat and his company, accusing them of creating millions of fake accounts to scrape information about individuals and employers. It was at least the second such lawsuit LinkedIn filed this year to stop a startup from stealing its data."
"Five years ago, a scraping operation like the ones targeting LinkedIn would have needed a team of engineers to build such a sophisticated system, said Sotiris Spyrou, an AI implementation consultant in London. Now it can be managed by a single person with advanced AI tools, he said. "LinkedIn isn't just fighting automation anymore," Spyrou said."
An operator based in northern Pakistan marketed ProAPIs as software capable of hundreds of scraping requests per second and sold harvested LinkedIn profile data for substantial monthly fees. LinkedIn sued the operator and the company, alleging mass creation of fake accounts to harvest information about people and employers. This lawsuit follows a prior case where a different scraping startup shut down amid legal pressure. Rapid advances in AI and automation now allow single individuals to run sophisticated scraping operations that previously required engineering teams, complicating enforcement and exposing gaps in legal protections for online data.
Read at Bloomberglaw
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