United States: Pratt's Privacy & Cybersecurity Law Report: Narrowing The Scope Of The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act: Ninth Circuit Finds In Favor Of Data Aggregator Scraping Data From Public Website

In this article, the authors discuss a recent federal circuit court decision and suggest that a company seeking the protection of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act should carefully analyze its data access policies and practices.

A "defining feature of public websites is that their publicly available sections lack limitations on access; instead, those sections are open to anyone with a web browser." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently reiterated in a significant ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn that the capture of data from the publicly accessible webpages of LinkedIn would not violate the prohibition in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") against accessing a computer "without authorization."

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