LinkedIn beats "BrowserGate" lawsuits over scanning users' Chrome extensions

Howell, Ganan’s lawyer, also serves as counsel for Fairlinked in the US. In a June court filing, Howell wrote that “my investigative work with Fairlinked e.V. and Browsergate occurred before my office filed the Ganan complaint.” LinkedIn said in a motion to dismiss that it uses detection systems to identify the type of automated scraping and bot activity that Teamfluence was deploying. LinkedIn told the court: Teamfluence, an Estonian platform, is one of those groups that traffics in scraping. It markets a Google Chrome browser plug-in designed to “[i]dentify 100% of your LinkedIn traffic.” LinkedIn caught it and banned its CEO from the platform, leading to a legal dispute in Germany. A German tribunal recently determined that “[t]he ‘Teamfluence’ software violates [LinkedIn’s User Agreement],” and that LinkedIn’s “suspending the Claimants’ user accounts is objectively justified overall and not arbitrary.” Ganan argued in a filing that the harm is “the unpermitted probe, not its yield,” but Chhabria wrote that “a plaintiff must identify ’embarrassing, invasive, or otherwise private information collected by’ the defendant.” LinkedIn’s motion to dismiss said it uses detection tools “to identify whether a visitor to the platform is operating a browser extension that could threaten the security and integrity of the platform,” and that “LinkedIn detects information that browser extensions openly provide to all websites in order to interact with them. The information is publicly available and in no way private. And LinkedIn’s right to detect this information is disclosed and agreed to by all its members. So is LinkedIn’s right to use security-focused vendors to detect and prevent potential abuse.” LinkedIn said that some Chrome browser extensions extract job listings and related data from the company’s website, and that LinkedIn’s terms prohibit extensions that scrape or copy data from the site. LinkedIn’s “rich platform and robust community make LinkedIn a target for opportunistic software developers who seek to scrape its data for their own purposes,” the company said. Howell told Ars today that the Ganan lawsuit “alleges that LinkedIn deployed code without users’ consent to surveil their internal computing environments, collect information, and route data to third parties.” “The companies developing and deploying these technologies should not get to decide, on their own, the boundaries of our privacy,” Howell said. “As their ability to observe and profile people expands, meaningful consent and judicial scrutiny become more important. … We intend to pursue these claims in a forum that can adjudicate them on their merits.” We also contacted Farrell’s lawyers about the judge’s ruling and will update this article if we get a response. Although Farrell’s lawyers don’t appear to have coordinated directly with Fairlinked, the claims in their lawsuit were based largely on the group’s BrowserGate report.