The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that scraping data from a public website doesn’t violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

In 2017, employment analytics firm HiQ filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn’s efforts to block it from scraping data from users’ profiles.

The court barred Linkedin from stopping HiQ scraping data after deciding the CFAA – which criminalises accessing a protected computer – doesn’t apply due to the information being...