Records / Negotiation levers

Scraped profile data carries a deletion risk that company records do not: never take it into a sale

LinkedIn's complaint against ProAPIs (N.D. Cal. 5:25-cv-08393) says the scraper sold LinkedIn member data to customers paying "up to $15,000 per month"; the consent judgment of 16 September 2026 bars it from selling or even giving away LinkedIn data "or information derived from LinkedIn Data" and records that it "Permanently deleted all LinkedIn Data" and destroyed reports built on it. The hiQ case ended the same way (held authorities us-ndcal-hiq-v-linkedin-2022-deletion and -judgment-amount), although scraping logged-out public pages was found not to breach terms in Meta v. Bright Data and X v. Bright Data (held us-ndcal-meta-v-bright-data-2024, us-ndcal-x-corp-v-bright-data-2024-preemption). Buyers screen for it: Grepped makes the seller name the source of any scraped content (held clause grepped--other-7) and OpenAI does not seek "information that belongs to a third party". OpenAI's 2023 crawler documentation said it filtered out sources "known to gather personally identifiable information (PII)" (the current page no longer carries that sentence).

Dated 16 Sep 2026Source checked 22 Oct 2026Not re-read automatically: the site's terms or its robots.txt do not allow itBasis: strong