LinkedIn is fighting two class action lawsuits filed Monday in US District Court for the Northern District of California over its practice of scanning users' browsers to identify installed extensions. Both complaints seek to represent all US LinkedIn users, with each naming a single plaintiff.
Both cases lean heavily on the 'BrowserGate' report published by Fairlinked, a German group that describes itself as a trade association for commercial LinkedIn users. The report documents LinkedIn's extension-scanning behavior in technical detail, and that sourcing matters: Fairlinked appears to be operated by the same people behind Teamfluence, an Estonian software company LinkedIn suspended for scraping user data in violation of its terms of service. Teamfluence already sued LinkedIn in Munich in January.
The conflict-of-interest question sitting at the center of this story is what makes the full article worth reading. The plaintiffs are building a federal privacy case on research produced by a company LinkedIn says broke its rules, and that tension has not been resolved. Watch the Northern District of California docket.
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