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Scraping is semi-controversial, but in this case it's just a user with a Chrome extension visiting the site. LinkedIn has lots and lots of shady patterns around showing different results to Google Bot vs. regular users to encourage logged in sessions. Many other sites like Pinterest and Twitter/X employ similar annoying patterns.

Imo, users should be allowed to use automation tools to access websites and collect data. Most of these sites thrive off of user generated content anyways, for example Reddit is built on UGC. Why shouldn't people be able to scrape it?



In hopes of saving someone a search: UGC = User Generated Content.


If let's say I built an extension that allows people to scrape things on demand and the extension sends that data also to my servers, removing PII in the process, would that be allowed?




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