Re:Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
by ninjaranter on Thursday February 12, 2015 @02:53PM
(#9040967)
US-only is fine. For money is potentially fine (I've no idea how much something like that would cost), if I knew it was legal - though if there was a legal way to get that data through scraping I'd probably just do that myself :)
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Re:Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
by mdaniel on Friday February 13, 2015 @12:21AM
(#9043021)
As I mentioned in a sibling reply, legality depends on your jurisdiction but in the US AFAIK scraping is no different from connecting to LinkedIn 15,000,000 times with a copy of Chrome.
To further illustrate this point, LinkedIn provides a helpful directory at the bottom of their homepage, allowing one to browse every user[0] and every company[1] in their graph. Hard pressed to argue that it's illegal to navigate to every single profile if you serve a directory of them.
Also, I believe there are companies[2] and shops[3] that specialize in doing that kind of thing. I would say it would be worth reaching out to them, if nothing else just to get a sense for what something like that would cost.
0 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/people-1-5-1/ 1 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/companies 2 = http://scrapinghub.com/ (makers of the outstanding Scrapy framework!) 3 = http://webscrapinghelp.com