The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit determined information posted to social networks that are publicly accessible may be scraped and aggregated by third parties regardless of the social media sites’ terms and conditions or even technical means taken to prevent data mining. In its recently issued opinion, the federal appellate court affirmed a lower court’s opinion granting a preliminary injunction against professional social networking site LinkedIn that prevents the company from blocking access to automated bots deployed by hiQ, a data aggregator. IAPP General Counsel, Research Director and Data Protection Officer Rita Heimes, CIPP/E, CIPP/US, CIPM, writes about the ramifications of this ruling in this piece for Privacy Tracker.
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