A California federal judge has finalized a consent decree between LinkedIn and two software companies — ProAPIs and joint business operator Netswift — requiring them to immediately stop scraping user data on LinkedIn’s platform. The agreement also requires the firms to stop selling or transferring the data they collected, close off access through fake accounts, and delete all scraped records. LinkedIn’s senior enforcement executive Sarah Wright called the outcome “an important triumph,” adding: “Your profile is yours. What you choose to share on LinkedIn is meant for the professional community you’re building, not for an outside company to scrape and use in ways you never agreed to.”
LinkedIn sued the companies and their CEO last October, alleging they had built a massive network of fake accounts — numbering in the millions — that scraped member profiles, company pages, school listings, and even reactions and comments on a near-constant basis. The complaint noted that LinkedIn routinely detected and blocked the bogus accounts within hours of their creation, but the firms compensated by spinning up hundreds or thousands of new accounts daily, making suppression effectively impossible. ProAPIs, which markets itself as a “data pipeline platform,” stated after the settlement that it “does not offer tools to scrape LinkedIn” and has agreed never to scrape the platform again. The resolution follows a separate April 2026 win LinkedIn secured against a browser extension that was harvesting user data without consent.