A good decision was reached, but it's a little worrying that the emphasis in the ruling was mostly about a weighing of business interests rather than affirming a right to access public information. If HiQ's business model had not been jeopardized by LinkedIn's business desire to block them, I fear this court could have easily gone the other way. I'd really love to see a ruling that solidifies the right of someone to access publicly available data without fear of repercussions. If this case makes it to SCOTUS, I would hope the ruling is predicated on that rather than business harm.
Key paragraphs from the ruling:
> In short, even if some users retain some privacy interests
in their information notwithstanding their decision to make
their profiles public, we cannot, on the record before us,
conclude that those interests—or more specifically,
LinkedIn’s interest in preventing hiQ from scraping those
profiles—are significant enough to outweigh hiQ’s interest
in continuing its business, which depends on accessing,
analyzing, and communicating information derived from
public LinkedIn profiles.
> Nor do the other harms asserted by LinkedIn tip the
balance of harms with regard to preliminary relief. LinkedIn
invokes an interest in preventing “free riders” from using
profiles posted on its platform. But LinkedIn has no
protected property interest in the data contributed by its
users, as the users retain ownership over their profiles. And as to the publicly available profiles, the users quite evidently
intend them to be accessed by others, including for
commercial purposes—for example, by employers seeking
to hire individuals with certain credentials. Of course,
LinkedIn could satisfy its “free rider” concern by eliminating
the public access option, albeit at a cost to the preferences of
many users and, possibly, to its own bottom line.
Key paragraphs from the ruling:
> In short, even if some users retain some privacy interests in their information notwithstanding their decision to make their profiles public, we cannot, on the record before us, conclude that those interests—or more specifically, LinkedIn’s interest in preventing hiQ from scraping those profiles—are significant enough to outweigh hiQ’s interest in continuing its business, which depends on accessing, analyzing, and communicating information derived from public LinkedIn profiles.
> Nor do the other harms asserted by LinkedIn tip the balance of harms with regard to preliminary relief. LinkedIn invokes an interest in preventing “free riders” from using profiles posted on its platform. But LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its users, as the users retain ownership over their profiles. And as to the publicly available profiles, the users quite evidently intend them to be accessed by others, including for commercial purposes—for example, by employers seeking to hire individuals with certain credentials. Of course, LinkedIn could satisfy its “free rider” concern by eliminating the public access option, albeit at a cost to the preferences of many users and, possibly, to its own bottom line.