LinkedIn files lawsuit against fake account holders

Some people may need to do some serious explaining if a California federal court were to uphold LinkedIn's contentions in a lawsuit filed this week. However, commentators also point to the possibility of the professional networking site just trying to make a point rather than actually starting a legal process.

Taking a serious view of the proliferation of fake profiles seemingly intended to connect to real job-seekers and employers for the sake of mining their data, Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn is claiming injunctive relief plus damages against 10 anonymous defendants.

According to the court papers, LinkedIn believes the group members are people "employing various automated software programmes" known as bots for the registration of fake LinkedIn accounts. According to LinkeIn, they deploy a method called "scraping," which violated the terms of service of the network and circumvented various "technical protection barriers" employed by LinkedIn. It was also in violation of the federal and California computer Relevant Products/Services laws as also federal copyright laws.

According to the network, the behaviour undermined the "integrity and effectiveness of LinkedIn's professional network."

The move comes as the latest attempt to thwart people who essentially came across no resistance in using social media either for frivolous or nefarious purposes. There have been instances where people created fake Twitter accounts in the names of celebrities or major corporations and sent out damaging Tweets, while Facebook had admitted that it had thousands of fake user accounts that it says it was trying to delete

Fake accounts have been a problem that almost all social networks have to deal with. Worse, these accounts are often used for a variety of undesirable actions, including proliferating spam and misleading people but, it seems, LinkedIn said it had had enough. According to a recent announcement, the company was taking legal action against parties involved in the setting up of and use of fake accounts, but it had no idea who they were suing.

Not only is data scraping a violation of the social network's terms and conditions, it was also illegal under the law. In addition to the security risks the site faced, these fake accounts also caused additional burdens on the social network's IT infrastructure.

"It undermines the integrity and effectiveness of LinkedIn's professional network by polluting it with thousands of fake member profiles," LinkedIn said in its complaint.