Queency Jain –
The Supreme Court of United States, by dismissing the ruling of a Lower Court, has provided a new opportunity to LinkedIn to prevent the rival hiQ labs from accessing the information, which the LinkedIn members have provided in their profiles publicly.
Earlier, the Lower Court had barred the social media platform LinkedIn to block the rival hiQ labs from accessing the information of its users which, in accordance with LinkedIn, violates the Right to privacy of an individual.
The hiQ labs are alleged for using the information of LinkedIn users in order to build its recruitment information service by predicting when an employee is expected to leave his existing company.
Though hiQ labs contented that the information used by them is displayed publicly and LinkedIn has no right to restrict such information, the social media platform LinkedIn argued that it was a clear violation of the rights of its users as they have signed up only for its app and not for other apps and thus warned hiQ labs to not share any information of its users, else their access will be barred.
After such a warning, hiQ labs filed a petition against LinkedIn to provide them with a legal injunction against such blocking of the access of information.
In conclusion, it was stated by LinkedIn that since its users have signed up for the guidelines and usage rules before uploading their data on the app, even though the data may be public, it still restricts other apps to not use any such data for their own benefits.