Microsoft’s LinkedIn faces Italian probe following user data scraping

Microsoft’s LinkedIn faces a probe by the Italian privacy watchdog after reports that the personal data of 500 million users was scraped off the platform and posted online.

The Italian authority said in a statement late Thursday that it started an investigation following “the dissemination of user data, including IDs, full names, email addresses, telephone numbers.”

The regulator said Italy has one of the highest numbers of subscribers to LinkedIn in Europe and called on affected users to “pay particular attention to any anomalies” related to their phone number and their account. Scraping is a technique that extracts data from a website, usually with automated software.