Thomas Kadri, an assistant law professor in the School of Law, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg Law article about data scraping.
Recent instances of data scraping at LinkedIn and Facebook shed light on a continuous debate over whether or not companies can invoke an anti-hacking law to restrict rivals from harvesting information from people’s online profiles.
The problem could reach the U.S. Supreme Court in a case over a data-scraping dispute between LinkedIn and workforce analytics startup hiQ Labs. The LinkedIn-hiQ case gets at a tension for privacy in the digital age, as more widely shared consumer data becomes more valuable to advertisers or analysts like hiQ, according to Kadri. He researches cybercrime and privacy.
“We’ve in many ways thought of privacy as keeping things hidden,” Kadri said. “But it’s not really about secrecy because a lot of the data that has value in the digital age is publicly accessible.”
The article continued to detail some of the areas of legal uncertainty as well as means to protect personal privacy.
