LinkedIn Gets ‘Browsergate’ Proposed Class Actions Thrown Out
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has had two separate proposed class actions claiming the site illegally scanned users’ browser extension data thrown out. Fairlinked argued LinkedIn violates prohibitions on collecting “special category data” (racial/ethnic origin, political beliefs, etc.) under European Union law, since browser extensions can contain sensitive data. The Browsergate report also argued the scanning violated California’s state privacy laws, punishable by a $5,000 fine per LinkedIn user in the state.
- ▪Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has had two separate proposed class actions claiming the site illegally scanned users’ browser extension data thrown out.
- ▪Fairlinked argued LinkedIn violates prohibitions on collecting “special category data” (racial/ethnic origin, political beliefs, etc.) under European Union law, since browser extensions can contain sensitive data.
- ▪The Browsergate report also argued the scanning violated California’s state privacy laws, punishable by a $5,000 fine per LinkedIn user in the state.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/linkedin-gets-browsergate-proposed-class-actions-thrown-out-2000810828 |
| Publication time | Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:33:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-11T21:38:35.271Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-11T21:38:43.297Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | e5qxamjKWS9G · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has had two separate proposed class actions claiming the site illegally scanned users’ browser extension data thrown out. In a ruling issued earlier this week, spotted by Ars Technica, Judge Vince Chhabria of the US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected the plaintiffs’ standing to sue, stating that they failed to demonstrate they had “browser extensions installed that conveyed private information to LinkedIn.” Chhabria also suggested that the two plaintiffs—California residents Nicholas Farrell and Jeff Ganan—would have difficulty proving any privacy violations occurred, let alone win the…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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