If you evaluate AI sourcing tools, you will read the phrase “searches every major source” a lot. What buyers hear is LinkedIn. What vendors rarely write down is where the data comes from.
The answer is usually a licensed data provider, or something they would prefer not to describe in writing.
The case everyone cites, and what it actually held
hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn is the case people reach for to argue scraping public profiles is fine. The Ninth Circuit did rule that scraping publicly accessible data was unlikely to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the US anti-hacking statute.
That part is real, and it matters. It is also not the end of the story, which is the part that gets left out.
LinkedIn went on to win on other grounds: scraping broke the user agreement hiQ had accepted, a breach of contract. The case ended in a judgment of about $500,000 against hiQ, and hiQ shut down.
Winning the CFAA argument and losing on breach of contract is still losing.
What that means for a product decision
The risk is not that scraping is criminal. The risk is a contract claim from a well-funded counterparty that has shown it will litigate to the end. For any company, that is not a line item. It can be the whole company.
Where SCOUT looks instead
SCOUT never searches LinkedIn, and every result says which source it came from. Its sources come in four kinds:
- Your own data: your past applicants, and insiderOne's members, who chose to be found. This is first-party data with consent attached.
- Open communities, through each site's public interface for developers: GitHub, GitLab, Stack Overflow, Hugging Face, DEV Community, OpenAlex, ORCID, Bluesky and Hacker News, and Product Hunt where insiderOne has it switched on.
- The open web, for portfolios, personal sites and speaker pages, where insiderOne has it switched on. LinkedIn, the big job boards and sites that copy LinkedIn profiles are blocked.
- A licensed people index, People Data Labs, where insiderOne has it switched on. SCOUT emails people from it only in the US; anyone else it finds there is an intro you send.
Where a site's terms don't allow cold email, as on GitHub, SCOUT drafts an intro for you to send, or gives you the profile link.
The licensed index is the route that holds up for professional data beyond the open web: access bought under a contract, rather than taken from a site whose terms forbid it.
What it costs
Without LinkedIn, some people are harder to find. Code and research sites cover engineers and researchers well. For a marketing manager or an operations lead, SCOUT searches your past applicants and insiderOne's members, Bluesky, the open web and the licensed index.