https://techmonitor.ai/policy/privacy-and-data-protection/what-is-web-scraping-linkedin-facebook-alibaba

LinkedIn became the latest victim of malicious web scraping this week, when 700m user records were lifted from the professional social networking site and posted on the dark web. It reflects a growing trend for scraping information from social networks and ecommerce sites to use or sell, which has been enabled by the rise of advanced artificial intelligence. But web scraping has legitimate uses too, meaning it is difficult for regulators to combat.

The incident is the second time LinkedIn has been targeted this year – in April, scraped data from 500m LinkedIn users was offered for sale online. Elsewhere, Facebook deemed its recent data breach, which resulted in 530 million user records appearing on the dark web, to be a result of web scraping rather than a leak, and earlier this year Alibaba had more than a billion records scraped by a rival e-commerce company from its Chinese shopping portal, Taobao.