Ninth Circuit declares that selectively banning potential
competitors from accessing and using public data "may well be
considered unfair competition under California law."
On September 9, 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued
a decision that could have broad implications for the role of
antitrust laws in the privacy sphere. In hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn
Corp., No. 17-16783, 2019 WL 4251889 (9th Cir. Sept. 9, 2019), a
Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the district court's grant of a
preliminary injunction in favor of hiQ, which prohibited LinkedIn
from denying access to publicly available data on LinkedIn
profiles.
hiQ, described by the Ninth Circuit as a competitor to LinkedIn,
is a data analytics company that "scrapes" data using
automated bots from public LinkedIn profiles. hiQ then uses this
data to develop corporate analytics tools (such as a tool that
predicts when an employee might leave for another job) that it
later sells to human resources
