A federal judge has dismissed two class action lawsuits accusing LinkedIn of scanning users' Chrome browser extensions, ruling that the California plaintiffs failed to show they were personally harmed by the alleged surveillance. US District Judge Vince Chhabria issued the ruling on Tuesday, granting the plaintiffs leave to amend their complaints while expressing doubt that they could build a plausible case. He noted that users voluntarily download browser extensions, which intentionally expose data to websites, making it unlikely the plaintiffs could ever allege a privacy violation or prevail.
California residents Nicholas Farrell and Jeff Ganan filed the separate class actions against LinkedIn in April, seeking to represent themselves and other LinkedIn users. Ganan's attorney, J.R. Howell, said he is weighing whether to refile the claims in California state court, which has different standing requirements, or to appeal the US district court ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Howell told Ars that the federal court found it lacked jurisdiction and did not decide whether LinkedIn's surveillance practices were lawful, adding that the ruling is not a vindication of the mass surveillance program alleged in the complaint.
In his ruling, Chhabria said Farrell never alleged that any of his own browser extensions revealed private information, and Ganan did not allege that he had any extensions installed at all. The judge found the allegations insufficient to confer standing, writing that identifying categories of private information that hypothetically could be revealed is not enough to allege harm particularized to a plaintiff's circumstances. Ganan had argued the harm was the unpermitted probe itself, but Chhabria wrote that a plaintiff must identify embarrassing, invasive, or otherwise private information collected by the defendant.
LinkedIn argued in its motion to dismiss that it uses detection systems to identify automated scraping and bot activity, including that deployed by Teamfluence, an Estonian platform. LinkedIn said Teamfluence markets a Google Chrome plug-in designed to identify LinkedIn traffic, and that a German tribunal recently found the software violates LinkedIn's User Agreement. After that order, the Teamfluence-linked group Fairlinked emerged with the so-called BrowserGate report, which drew coverage on tech news sites; LinkedIn noted that Teamfluence's founder sits on Fairlinked's board.
Howell also serves as counsel for Fairlinked in the US, though he wrote in a June court filing that his investigative work with the group occurred before the Ganan complaint was filed. He told Ars that the Ganan lawsuit alleges LinkedIn deployed code without users' consent to surveil their computing environments and route data to third parties. Farrell's lawyers were also contacted about the ruling; his lawsuit was based largely on the BrowserGate report, though his lawyers do not appear to have coordinated directly with Fairlinked.
More software news from TechManNews.
