LinkedIn Data Vendors Are Lying

As Daddy Pig from Peppa Pig says, I'm a little bit of an expert in everything, but I am particularly so with LinkedIn data and LinkedIn lawsuits. I am going to tell you how to get yourself and your company sued by LinkedIn when you use their data. I was the CEO of Proxycurl, the largest LinkedIn scraper and Proxycurl was sued by LinkedIn and I know everything about scraping LinkedIn at scale and LinkedIn data. I'm going to reveal the industry secrets in this piece.

LinkedIn Data Vendors Are Lying

They are scraping behind LinkedIn auth walls

I'm not going to name names, but your favourite LinkedIn data vendor is lying that their scraped LinkedIn data is sourced publicly. Especially if they can return:

1. Work Experience
2. Education history
3. Skills
4. Certifications

Don't believe me? Check this screenshot of the public profile out.

You don't get either of these data from a public LinkedIn profile, and it has stopped being so for about being two years. And if you are getting these data points from your LinkedIn scraping vendor, they are either:

1. scraping LinkedIn with logged in accounts OR that
2. they are serving you stale data that is at least 2 years old.

Fact is, public LinkedIn profiles these days are pointless these days. At best, they tell you their current company's name and their name. Not their role, nor their work history, etc.

Numeric Company IDs

Another tell that a LinkedIn data vendor is if they can turn a numeric company URL such as https://linkedin.com/company/123 into a full profile data. There are only two ways to do this.

1. They are reading off a stale LinkedIn database (again, at least two years old).
2. They are scraping behind LinkedIn auth walls.

There is literally no other way.

You are getting illicitly obtained data

Don't take my words as it is. Challenge your LinkedIn data vendor to prove that they are scraping public LinkedIn data. Here's how you can do it:

1. Change something in your public LinkedIn profile
2. Ask then to use their API to retrieve the profile data, and verify that the key attribute is updated.
3. Search on Google with your own profile and that particular uniquely identifiable data point, and you'll see that not even Google will have it.

You will need to perform step 3 to pre-empt your vendor from stating that LinkedIn is serving another version of the public profile to Google spiders VS you, the public. Which (1) violates Google's Search Spam Policies. And now with your testing in step 3, is a lie.

Put together, it is highly likely that your favourite LinkedIn Scraping API is serving you LinkedIn data scraped behind auth walls or serving you stale data.

What about legal precedence via Bright Data v Meta or HiQ v LinkedIn?

You are right. Working with public LinkedIn data, or really any other platform's public data is likely kosher according to the past legal precedence. But, do you or your company have a LinkedIn profile? That means you have accepted LinkedIn's User Agreement which essentially puts you at civil liability to not use their data for commercial reasons, even if it is scraped publicly.

You cannot have your cake and eat it at the same time. LinkedIn is out to protect their data. They know it is valuable and it is their moat.

"Fuck it. I'm going to take the LinkedIn lawsuit risk"

Says every entrepreneur who has read far too much of startup erotica is willing to take on potential legal risks (on top of financial and opportunity risks) to get your venture off the ground. I know I did. I mean, how many companies did LinkedIn attempt to sue anyways?

Answer: more than you think. They send out plenty of cease and desists.

I'm not going to stop you because I led that startup naivety when I was a younger. So I'm going to teach you a hack. This hack will give you the LinkedIn data goodness without spending 5 figures.

The LinkedIn Data Hack

If you do not care about legal liabilities with LinkedIn, then I am going to teach you how to get the LinkedIn data goodness at the cheapest price possible, without exposing yourself as a customer in the database of these LinkedIn scrapers which will ultimately get sued.

1. There are leaked LinkedIn data dumps. Find a way to get them. They are everywhere but stale. (Do not email me asking where to find it, I will not help)
2. Ask your AI agent to use NinjaPear API on a PAYG plan to refresh the data of your dumps on a per-need basis and fetch work email contact data.

This way:

• You control the freshness of the data via NinjaPear refreshes.
• Your costs are PAYG, no need to pay 5 figures for a stale database dump.
• You would not be logged as a customer of a LinkedIn scraper vendor.

But beware. This does not reduce your liabilities in anyway. You are still equally exposed to the legal liabilities and should your lawsuit come to the discovery process, the very fact that you seeded your company with a LinkedIn data dump would put you in a very bad position.

But hey, at least you saved yourself 5 figures and you reduced a vector of exposure via means of being a customer of LinkedIn data scrapers which will ultimately get sued.

Why NinjaPear?

NinjaPear is the only data vendor with an API and an MCP that is able to supply web-scale B2B intelligence data without LinkedIn data. Here are some statistics:

1. We are able to enrich 99.8% of all companies sent to our Company Details API Endpoint. Companies that fail to enrich are companies without a website or cannot be crawled (IE: LinkedIn.com).
2. We are able to enrich 63% of all people profiles enrichment requests sent to our Person Profile API Endpoint. Not shabby relative to the fact that we do not scrape LinkedIn and only data available on the public web on each target person.
3. We are able to enrich 100% employee search requests through public data of relevant people by their role in a company.
4. We are able to enrich ~90% of work email requests through public data or known company email patterns. On top of that, we verify these emails if they are trivially verifiable. (Microsoft-based emails are not trivially verifiable)

On top of that, our data are enriched in real-time and we do not read off a database unless you request for (faster) cached data. Just to be very clear, NinjaPear does not work off a leaked LinkedIn database dump or any data dump of any sorts.

How To Get sued By LinkedIn And Lose A 10M Company?

It is easy to get sued by LinkedIn and lose your company that you are building:

1. Have a LinkedIn profile for either yourself or your company.
2. Use LinkedIn scraped/purchased data in a commercial way. Be it publicly scraped or not.

Done. And even if you don't get sued, you will find it difficult to:

1. exit a company
2. raise venture funding

Why do you think I tried to sell Proxycurl 3x? Be smart, scale without LinkedIn data the NinjaPear way.