LinkedIn is the ultimate platform for finding new clients, employees, and networking opportunities. It’s a goldmine of valuable data with nearly 1 billion users from over 200 countries.
The data scraped from LinkedIn can enrich any data pipeline, be it specifically tracking individual profiles or companies’ profiles.
Clearly, the use cases of fresh LinkedIn data are endless, making it a valuable resource for staying informed and competitive.
If you are a company looking to scrape it, definitely knowing its legality would help.
Before writing this post, I did extensive research and found mixed answers—some sources claim LinkedIn scraping is entirely illegal, while others say it’s legal under certain conditions.
This makes the legality of LinkedIn scraping a bit confusing.
But don’t worry! I’ve broken it all down to help you understand clearly.
First, we’ll explore what LinkedIn says about scraping, then we’ll look into the court rulings!!
What's LinkedIn Stance on Scraping
As per their policy, they are very clear that scraping isn’t allowed. Usage of any third-party software is strictly prohibited to scrape LinkedIn.
The policy further mentions that they can ban services that manipulate their algorithms and specifically mentioned that creating fake accounts and automated actions is a BIG No!
Here’s a breakdown of what they don’t allow:
- No scraping or copying data: LinkedIn explicitly prohibits using any software or tools to scrape profiles or other data from the platform without their consent.
- No automated bots: You can’t use bots to access LinkedIn, download contacts, send messages, or perform any actions that a human would typically do.
- No bypassing controls: Overriding any security features, like limits on searches or profile views, is against the rules.
- No, interfering with LinkedIn’s operations: LinkedIn also restricts actions that could overload their servers or otherwise interfere with their service, like causing spam or denial-of-service attacks.
So is scraping LinkedIn Not Legal?
Well, the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) gave a more flexible answer.
According to them, scraping publicly available data isn’t considered hacking.
In cases like hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn (we will discuss this in the next section), the court ruled that scraping public profiles without breaking into a private account isn’t illegal under the CFAA.
So, As Per CFAA Is It Legal to Scrape LinkedIn?
Yes, It is legal to scrape LinkedIn if you are doing it ethically & only extracting publicly available data.✔️
To help you more I have dug deeper by giving a few examples that have happened in the past.
Mantheos a Singapore-based company faced the heat from LinkediIn for Scraping its data.
You can read more about the case over here. However, just to give you a brief about the case, fake cards were used by Mantheos to bypass LinkedIn payment system.
After getting a paid LinkedIn account prospect’s details were fetched from them.
This type of method is of course illegal and the person behind this idea should be punished.
Everybody know for a fact that Google also works by crawling over all the websites/domains. Over the time they had build large crawlers that keep scraping websites to make its search result algorithm smarter & better.
But they are quite large and they can deal with legal matters very easily as compared to small companies or any individual.
There’s another case that happened in between hiQ and LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn by creating fake accounts.
In November 2022 the court said that “hiQ already knew that they were illegally acquiring Linkedin’s data through web scraping”.
But in 2022 California District Court found some evidence of the exchange of emails among LinkedIn employees where it was very clear that LinkedIn was aware of this scraping back in 2014 and let it happen until 2017.
In the end, both parties agreed to a private settlement.
This whole mess concludes that you should not do the following:
- Do not create fake accounts on Linkedin.
- Do not bypass their payment wall with fake credit cards.
- Respect server bandwidth.
You can scrape everything available to the public and again I am referring to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act(CFAA) they said that scraping anything in public domain is Legal and this shouldn’t be considered as malpractice.
Limitations of Scraping LinkedIn: What You Need to Know
LinkedIn has placed a limit of 50 profiles per user in recent years. This means that you can only scrape 50 profiles in a day.
But LinkedIn is too smart and it will block your account because of data extraction activity as soon as it detects it.
Other than this if you are willing to scrape LinkedIn without creating a user account then LinkedIn will redirect you to either a Login screen or it will through a captcha like this.
How Can You Scrape LinkedIn At Scale
Scrapingdog can help you scrape LinkedIn at scale without getting blocked. By using Scrapingdog you will never face any kind of legal issues as your IP will never be used.
How?
We don’t use your or any account of LinkedIn for that matter to scrape data from it.
You can look at one of the Reddit thread, wherein someone mentioned us and stated that we do it without session cookie. ⬇️
With Scrapingdog’s Linkedin Scraper API, You can scrape up to 1 Million profiles per day and this scraper is capable of bypassing any kind of captcha. The data you get is in JSON format.
Brightdata is another company that offers LinkedIn Scraper API but it is too expensive. Scrapingdog is a better Brightdata Alternative in terms of affordability & performance.
Scraping a LinkedIn profile can cost as much low as $0.009 and goes below that if you want to scrape more than 100k profiles per month. On the other hand, Bightdata will charge you $0.01 per profile which makes it extremely expensive.
There are other solutions available in the market, but they often provide outdated data and not scraped in real time.
Some of the providers has data points up to 5 years old, making it unreliable.
Other than scraping company and individual profiles, we do offer a LinkedIn Jobs Scraping API which can be used for scraping LinkedIn Jobs at scale with a simple GET request.
Also, if you are looking for other tools, I have compiled a list of best LinkedIn Data Scraping Tools.
Each of them are different parameters including scalability, developer friendliness, stability etc.
Additional Resources
Web Scraping with Scrapingdog
