LinkedIn’s Paul Rockwell said that their Global Trust Teams create and maintain models that detect abuse, stop attacks, and block scams — limiting the bad stuff that exists on the internet from ever reaching the platform users, this includes making them aware of scraped data shenanigans.
LinkedIn informs members about scraped data
Data scraping is a technique where a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program, for example, data from a website to a local file saved on your computer. Some companies scrape data from people’s web pages. LinkedIn says they want to inform people about this act — reveal much of what is not being talked about.
“Scraped data can be gathered from multiple sites, combed, and sold in large batches, to be used for phishing and other campaigns designed to trick you into sharing private information,” Rockwell said on Thursday, 15 July 2021.
“When your data is taken without permission and used in ways you haven’t agreed to, that’s not okay. On LinkedIn, our members trust us with their information, which is why we prohibit unauthorised scraping on our platform,” Rockwell added
However, Rockwell said that scraping is not always bad, especially when it benefits both the websites and the users of search services.
When is data scraping bad?
Rockwell said that unauthorised scraping by itself is not a breach or a hack although it might seem that way. He said that scraping does not mean an attacker has been able to get inside secure systems, canker firewalls, or access protected network information. He added that scraping can only mean that cheaters can collect a lot of data and use it in ways that you didn’t expect.
The professional networking platform said that it uses its entire toolkit, including AI and legal methods, to stop this behavior and hold perpetrators responsible because even though the bad actors can’t break into your network, it is still really abusive.
What can users do to protect themselves?
LinkedIn warned users to spend some time looking at what information they added, from contact details to work history, and get familiar with their settings.
The networking platform also stressed that users should only put up information they are sure they want to be public and detected by search engines. And then they will use their tools to make sure your data is safe.