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.”
Judge: Plaintiffs did not allege concrete harm
After the German court order, the Teamfluence-linked group called Fairlinked emerged with the BrowserGate report, which attracted coverage on a number of tech news sites.
“No surprise: the founder of Teamfluence sits on Fairlinked’s board,” LinkedIn’s motion said. “Having been caught for scraping, and held to have violated LinkedIn’s terms, he has now embarked on an international retaliation campaign by manufacturing a fake privacy controversy. But it is Teamfluence that is scraping data without consent.” Teamfluence’s CEO and founder is named Steven Morell.
Chhabria’s ruling said that neither Farrell nor Ganan “alleges that they, specifically, had browser extensions installed that conveyed private information to LinkedIn. Ganan never alleges that he had any extensions installed at all. Farrell alleges that he ‘has long had several browser extensions installed,’ and that, in general, browser extensions ‘often reveal sensitive private information about its users,’ but he never alleges that one of his own browser extensions revealed such information.”
The judge said the “allegations are insufficient to confer standing because only ‘those plaintiffs who have been concretely harmed by a defendant’s statutory violation may sue that private defendant over that violation in federal court.’ Identifying categories of private information that hypothetically could be revealed by surveillance of browser extensions is not enough to allege standing ‘particularized to a plaintiff’s circumstances,’” as precedent requires.