Is Personal Data a Public Good?
Permitted piracy with LinkedIn vs HiQ. The MadHATTERS Editorial, 18 September 2019
MadHATTERs Weekly
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If the data’s public, is ok. So says the US Court of Appeals.
Last week, ruling on LinkedIn’s taking HiQ Labs to task for scraping data off its platform, the court decided companies cannot simply invoke the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to stop spammers or scrapers from accessing user data from the ol’ publicly-accessible interwebs.
Some say the ruling’s a big step towards a more open internet, others contend it violates user privacy. Scraped data can easily be used to identify employees looking to change jobs. This is all core semantic web stuff.
The key to this decision apparently lies in the authorisation and permissions that determine what’s public and non-public data. Clearly, the court sees the LinkedIn data as the former. But what’s interesting is that by okaying HiQ’s actions, the law has effectively taken ‘ownership’ of that data away from LinkedIn. Kinda sounds like permissioned piracy. Is this another strike against corporate overlording?
Is personal data a public good? The crucial party — the individuals who produce the data, to whom the data should rightfully belong — seem to have no voice in the matter. Again. Huzzah.
MadHATTERs is a weekly newsletter covering technology, personal data, and the Internet. Its perspective championing decentralised personal data is led by Dataswift with the Hub of All Things (HAT) technology. If you like what you read, subscribe to receive MadHATTERs in your inbox. Find out more about the HAT at www.hubofallthings.com
