The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the decision of the District Court to grant a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn’s conduct which selectively prevented hiQ from obtaining and using information shared by LinkedIn users and available publicly to anyone viewing with a web browser. With the assistance of automated bots, hiQ scraped information from users public profiles on LinkedIn including name, work history, job titles and skills, and used the information to yield “people analytics” in order to sell it to its business clients. The panel ruled that a cause-and-desist action against hiQ preventing access to data on LinkedIn server established “a likelihood of irreparable harm” and threatened the survival of its business. Thus, in balancing equities, the court held that hiQ’s interest in continuing business decidedly outweighed privacy interests of some LinkedIn users in their information, irrespective of their decision to make profiles public. The panel further ruled that hiQ raised a serious question as to whether accessing “without authorization” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “limits the scope of statutory coverage to computer information for which access permission is generally required.”