Can I scrape LinkedIn profiles?
It is technically possible and legally the riskiest kind of LinkedIn scraping. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits it, and profiles are personal data, so privacy law such as GDPR applies to whatever you collect even when the profile is public. That makes profiles a materially different risk from job postings. This is general information, not legal advice, and a specific project needs a lawyer.
Three layers stack up. The first is contract: the User Agreement bars scraping by any means, including crawlers and browser plugins, and bars copying information from the service without the owner's consent. The second is the case law. hiQ v. LinkedIn was about public profiles, and although the Ninth Circuit held in 2022 that the US computer-fraud statute likely did not reach public pages, the trial court found hiQ in breach of the User Agreement, and the case ended with a settlement and a judgment requiring hiQ to stop scraping and destroy the scraped profile data. The third is privacy law, which does not depend on LinkedIn at all. Under GDPR, publicly available personal data still needs a lawful basis, notice to the people concerned and limits on retention, and European regulators have acted on this: in 2024 the French data protection authority fined a vendor for collecting contact details from LinkedIn profiles.
JobsPipe does not collect people profiles and is not a source of them. It collects job postings, and many projects that start as profile scraping are really questions about companies: who is hiring, which teams are growing, which tools they use. Postings answer those without personal data. POST /v1/jobs/search with company_name_or returns a company's open roles, skills_or finds employers hiring for a technology, and job_title_or with posted_at_gte shows new roles by function.
If you need data about a person, the sanctioned routes are that person's consent through Sign In with LinkedIn, or LinkedIn's partner programs for recruiting and sales tools. If the need is account research or hiring signals, start from postings: the sandbox search endpoint needs no key, and the free tier is enough to test a list of target companies.
The full treatment is on Scraping and legality.
Related questions
Is it legal to scrape public LinkedIn profiles?
There is no single answer, and public does not mean unregulated. In the United States the appeals court in hiQ v. LinkedIn held that the computer-fraud statute likely does not cover public pages, yet hiQ still lost on contract claims. In Europe and the United Kingdom, GDPR applies to personal data however it was obtained. Take legal advice for your facts.
Does GDPR apply to LinkedIn profile data that anyone can see?
Yes. GDPR covers information relating to an identifiable person, and publishing it on a profile does not remove that protection. A collector needs a lawful basis, has to inform the people concerned and has to limit how long the data is kept. Data protection authorities have issued guidance on scraping and have fined companies that built contact databases from LinkedIn profiles.
Is there an official LinkedIn API for profile data?
Only with consent or a partnership. Sign In with LinkedIn returns the authenticated member's own name, headline, photo and email after they agree to share them. Recruiting and sales integrations receive profile information through partner programs that LinkedIn approves case by case. LinkedIn's documentation describes no self-serve API for looking up arbitrary member profiles.
Does JobsPipe provide LinkedIn profile or contact data?
No. JobsPipe collects job postings from public, logged-out listing pages and does not log in to LinkedIn or collect member profiles. What it returns is about roles and employers: job_title, company, location, date_posted, status and the technologies a posting names. For contact data you need a provider built for that purpose, along with its compliance terms.
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