Supreme Court Lets Pro-Facebook Decision Stand In Battle Over Data Scraping

The Supreme Court on Oct 10 refused to review a ruling that Power Ventures, a defunct aggregation service, violated a federal hacking law by scraping Facebook's site. The court did not provide a reason for its move, which let stand a decision issued in 2016 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court said in its ruling that Power violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Facebook after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.

The anti-hacking law, which provides for private lawsuits as well as criminal penalties, prohibits people from accessing computers without authorization. The battle between the companies dates to 2008, when Power was trying to grow a service that enabled people to use a single portal to log in to a variety of social networking companies -- including MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. To accomplish this, Power asked users to provide log-in information for their social networking sites and then imported people's information.