ProAPIs sued by LinkedIn over alleged massive data-scraping operation

Software firm ProAPIs and its CEO Rahmat Alam have been sued by professional social networking site LinkedIn for allegedly running a large-scale scheme that gathers data from millions of its users' profiles and sells it without authorization, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

In a complaint filed in a Northern California federal court, ProAPIs purportedly manages a system that generates millions of fake accounts to collect user information. This is then marketed to paying clients, with some reportedly spending as much as $15,000 each month for access to the scraped data.

The range of materials from the platform allegedly includes user profiles, comments, posts, and reactions. LinkedIn argues that the rise of AI has spurred a wave of businesses that extract user information, threatening individual privacy.

"Defendants' industrial-scale fake account mill scrapes member information that real people have posted on LinkedIn, including data that is only available behind LinkedIn's password wall and that Defendants' customers may not otherwise be allowed to access, and certainly are not allowed to copy and keep in perpetuity," according to the lawsuit.