LinkedIn has been sued for scanning users’ browsers to determine which extensions they have installed.
According to Ars Technica, two class action complaints were filed by different law firms on behalf of different plaintiffs on Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuit stems from a report that was published by an association called Fairlinked, a German advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users.
A few days ago, the group claimed that LinkedIn illegally scans users’ browsers to see what extensions they have running. Allegedly, these scans can identify thousands of extensions, including tools that compete with LinkedIn’s own services.
“Every time you visit linkedin.com, a JavaScript program embedded in the page scans your browser for installed Chrome extensions. The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user. It does not ask for consent. It does not disclose what it is doing. It reports the results to LinkedIn’s servers,” Fairlined wrote in its report, which is dubbed “BrowserGate.”
The advocacy group described LinkedIn’s practices as “one of the largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history.”
According to experts, this information could reveal sensitive personal information or corporate insights, especially when linked to LinkedIn profiles.
LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary, acknowledges that it scans users’ browsers for extensions, but does so to identify users who violate its terms of use.
“The claims made on the website linked here are plain wrong. The person behind them is subject to an account restriction for scraping and other violations of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said in a Hacker News post.
J.R. Howell, the Santa Monica attorney who filed the complaint, told Ars Technica that a “reasonable user does not consent to mass browser surveillance and third-party data exploitation through vague references to security, cookies, add-ons, or abuse prevention.”
On top of that, he argues that the case revolves around allegations of a lack of consent.
“The real question is not whether LinkedIn says it was fighting abuse of the Terms of Service. The question is whether users were actually informed, in any clear and meaningful way, that LinkedIn would secretly probe their browsers for installed extensions, extract session-linked data, and make that data available to undisclosed third parties whose own uses could extend beyond a one-time compliance check.”
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