GoKawiilLinkedIn is facing two lawsuits over its practice of scanning users’ browsers to determine which extensions they’re running. Two class action complaints were filed by different law firms on behalf of different plaintiffs Monday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Each complaint has one named plaintiff and seeks to represent a proposed class including all LinkedIn users in the US. The complaints seem to rely heavily on the recent “BrowserGate” report by a German entity called Fairlinked, which describes itself as a trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users.
Fairlinked appears to be run by the same people behind Teamfluence, an Estonian software company that sued LinkedIn in Munich in January. LinkedIn says Teamfluence distributed a browser extension that scraped LinkedIn user data in violation of the user agreement, and that its LinkedIn accounts were suspended.
LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary, does not deny that it scans browsers to identify extensions. There is a dispute over whether LinkedIn adequately discloses the scanning and how it uses the information it gathers. LinkedIn says it looks for extensions that violate its terms by scraping user data without consent.
The scanning is performed on Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge. LinkedIn’s privacy policy discloses that the company uses cookies and similar technologies to collect information about each user’s “web browser and add-ons.” LinkedIn acknowledges collecting this data along with other information about the user’s network and device, such as the IP address and operating system.
The “add-ons” reference in LinkedIn’s privacy policy seems to refer to browser extensions, as the two words are often used interchangeably. The BrowserGate report and the two lawsuits filed this week allege that the privacy policy disclosure isn’t extensive enough.