LinkedIn Beat the Lawsuit. The Scanning Didn't Stop.

LinkedIn Beat the Lawsuit. The Scanning Didn't Stop. Back in April I wrote about BrowserGate — the hidden JavaScript that scans every Chromium browser hitting linkedin.com for over 6,000 installed extensions, ships the results off to LinkedIn and third parties, and does it all without a word of disclosure in the privacy policy. Two class-action lawsuits followed within days of the report going public. This week we got the first real answer from a court, and it's messier than the headlines from either side are going to let on. On Tuesday, September 8, US District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California dismissed both cases — Ganan and Farrell — the ones filed back in April alleging LinkedIn's scanning violated California privacy law and the state's anti-hacking statutes. Three pages. Done. Here's the part that matters if you're skimming headlines: this wasn't a ruling that the scanning is fine. It was a ruling that these two plaintiffs didn't plead their way into…