hiQ v. LinkedIn
The 2017–2022 fight over scraping public profiles: not hacking under the CFAA, but a breach of contract all the same.
hiQ Labs scraped public LinkedIn profiles and sold analytics to employers, including predictions of which staff looked ready to quit. In 2017 LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter citing the CFAA. hiQ sued first and won a preliminary injunction against being blocked.
In 2019 the Ninth Circuit agreed that data anyone can see without logging in is hardly accessed "without authorization". The Supreme Court sent the case back after its 2021 Van Buren decision, and the appeals court reached the same answer in 2022. The victory lasted about six months: the district court found hiQ had breached LinkedIn's user agreement, not least by using fake accounts, and the parties settled with hiQ deleting the data. The lesson for scrapers is that contract law bites where criminal law doesn't.