SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for LinkedIn Inc. and data-mining startup hiQ Labs Inc. jousted in court Thursday afternoon in a case that could determine the fate of hiQ.

Until recently, hiQ was using data from public LinkedIn profiles to create analytics tools for employers to identify valuable workers and map the skillset of their workforces. But in-house counsel for LinkedIn sent the company a cease-and-desist letter in late May claiming that hiQ's scraping activities were prohibited under the site's terms of service. LinkedIn set up technical barriers to block hiQ's access and warned that any further efforts to access the site would risk violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law passed in 1986 that carries civil and criminal penalties.

HiQ returned fire with counsel from Farella Braun + Martel earlier this month suing LinkedIn in federal court in San Francisco asking for a declaratory judgment allowing it to continue collecting information from publicly available LinkedIn profiles. The dispute pits the interest that social media companies like LinkedIn have in policing access to their sites against the ability of data-crunchers like hiQ to gather publicly available material on the web.