Responsible sourcing
Policy in effect since October 9, 2026. Next review by April 9, 2027, or sooner if a source changes.
How to read this page
This page explains how TalentInitiator applies these rules. It is not legal advice for your organization. Our team checks every source again by November 30, 2026, and sources marked “Pending legal review” have not been confirmed by counsel yet.
What we never do
- Scraping of any website or network, logged in or out.
- Browser extensions or bots acting on a recruiter’s account.
- Automated logins, fake profiles or rotating proxies.
- Importing purchased datasets of scraped profiles.
- Profiles from people-data vendors. They are not offered in the product, on this site or on our roadmap.
Why
The platform’s terms
LinkedIn’s User Agreement, in its version of November 3, 2025, forbids in section 8.2 scraping the service, using bots or other unauthorized automated methods, using browser extensions that access the service, creating false identities, and copying member data obtained from it. Those terms bind the recruiters whose seats such a tool would use, so the tool puts our customers’ Recruiter accounts at risk of restriction.
Sources
- LinkedIn User Agreement, s. 8.2 Version of November 3, 2025
Courts and enforcement
hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn ended on December 8, 2022 with a consent judgment: a permanent injunction against scraping LinkedIn, deletion of the scraped data and the code built on it, and US$500,000 in damages. LinkedIn sued Proxycurl in January 2025 over fake accounts and large-scale profile scraping, and Proxycurl shut down in July 2025. LinkedIn brought a similar action against ProAPIs in October 2025. In France, the data-protection authority fined KASPR €240,000 in December 2024 for collecting LinkedIn members’ contact details beyond what they could reasonably expect.
Sources
- hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp. (consent judgment) Decided December 8, 2022
- LinkedIn action against Proxycurl (service shut down July 2025)
- LinkedIn action against ProAPIs (October 2025)
- CNIL sanction against KASPR (December 2024)
Canadian privacy regulators
In the Clearview AI investigation, reported on February 2, 2021, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the commissioners of Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta rejected the argument that social-media content is “publicly available” and free to collect without consent. PIPEDA’s exception for publicly available information covers only the categories its regulations list, and a profile page anyone can see is not one of them. In October 2024, the Commissioner and other members of the Global Privacy Assembly confirmed in a joint statement that publicly accessible personal information is still protected, that scraping needs a lawful basis, and that a platform’s terms do not make it lawful on their own.
Sources
What people expect
PIPEDA limits collection to purposes a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances. A recruiting message built from a profile someone never shared with you does not meet that test, whatever the profile’s privacy settings.
What we do instead
| Channel | What it is | Legal basis | Integrations and state |
|---|---|---|---|
| Careers pages and the apply flow | Bilingual careers pages hosted for each customer. Candidates apply directly and read the privacy notice before they send anything. |
|
|
| Application emails, job-board exports and the Applications API | Each job has an intake address for applications that job boards forward by email. Recruiters can import the CSV or spreadsheet exports of their job-board employer accounts, and a customer’s own systems can send applications through the Applications API. |
|
|
| Résumés and self-import | Recruiters import the résumés of people who applied to them, as PDF, DOCX or ZIP files. Candidates can upload their own LinkedIn profile export from their portal. |
| In the product today |
| Job boards | Indeed through its developer agreement; Job Bank through an export tagged with the NOC code, with Job Match invitations logged by hand; Jobillico for Quebec. |
|
|
| LinkedIn’s partner program | The Job Posting API first, then Recruiter System Connect on the customer’s own Recruiter seats, with the customer’s authorization and LinkedIn’s member-data deletion module. |
|
|
How the product enforces it
- Every candidate source record has a legal basis with one of three values: the person consented, the person applied, or a contract licenses the data. There is no value for scraped or vendor data, so such a record cannot be stored.
- Each source record keeps its provenance: the channel, where and when the document or address came in, and the text the person was shown, with its consent record and a retention date. The candidate’s record and their access-request export show the same provenance.
- Our terms of service forbid customers from uploading scraped data.
- An automated check fails the build if scraping or browser-automation libraries, or LinkedIn login code, appear anywhere in the product.
What this means for your recruiters
Recruiters keep using their own LinkedIn Recruiter seats as they do today. When the partner integration is approved, candidates and InMail history will sync from those seats into your data hub, with your authorization. Until then, new candidates come from your postings, your job boards and the people who apply.