LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission
Found on Ars Technica on Monday, 31 July 2017
A small company called hiQ is locked in a high-stakes battle over Web scraping with LinkedIn. It's a fight that could determine whether an anti-hacking law can be used to curtail the use of scraping tools across the Web.
Both Kerr's view that running a public website implicitly gives the public authorization to access it and LinkedIn's view that companies can rescind authorization on a case-by-case basis are plausible interpretations of the law.
If you don't want the data to be accessed, don't publish it. Even if you argue that bots are not the target group of the publishing website, some might just outsource the scraping to a crowd of underpaid workers in India. Then you have humans browsing the website, and the data still gets collected. At that point, the topic of search engines which scrape and index the website to direct visitors there (while profiting by placing ads on the search results) has not even been touched.