A judge has ordered that Microsoft must allow others to scrape your LinkedIn data

The ruling comes after Microsoft demanded a startup called hiQ Labs stop scraping LinkedIn users’ data. The startup then sued Microsoft and now a judge has ruled in the startup’s favor, reports the Wall Street Journal. LinkedIn user data is valuable, which is why Microsoft bought the social network in the first place. By scraping the publicly available user data, Microsoft alleged that hiQ Labs was violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But the judge disagreed and instead said LinkedIn was “unfairly leveraging its power in the professional networking market for an anticompetitive purpose.” For its part, Microsoft said “This case is not over. We will continue to fight to protect our members’ ability to control the information they make available on LinkedIn.”