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 court properly. Jeff Ganan's complaint, per Chhabria, "never alleges that he had any extensions installed at all." Hard to claim LinkedIn violated your privacy by scanning extensions you never say you had. Nicholas Farrell did better — he alleged he had "several" extensions — but didn't connect the dots to allege those specific extensions revealed anything sensitive about him to LinkedIn. Standing failure, not merits failure. Both plaintiffs get one more shot: amended complaints are due September 22. Chhabria isn't exactly bullish on that second attempt either. LinkedIn argued that browser extensions are voluntarily installed software that, by their nature, intentionally exposes data to the sites they run on — so there's no reasonable expectation of privacy to violate in the first place. Chhabria bought enough of that to write that it's unlikely the plaintiffs will ever be able to allege a privacy violation, "much less prevail at the end of the day." That's a judge previewing the ending before the sequel's even been filed. LinkedIn, naturally, is going to bank this as vindication. It's not. It's a pleading defect. The underlying facts from the BrowserGate evidence pack — the 6,000+ extension scan list, the DOM crawling LinkedIn internally calls "Spectroscopy," the mapping of competitor sales tools to identified employers — none of that got adjudicated. The judge didn't say the scanning was legal. He said these two specific people didn't show they were harmed by it in a way California law recognizes. That's a narrower, much less satisfying outcome than "LinkedIn beats lawsuit" implies, and worth remembering the next time a headline flattens it into a win. Worth noting too: this ruling only touches the US class actions. The Munich case — Teamfluence's DMA-based injunction against LinkedIn Ireland and Germany, in front of the same judge who ruled against Google — is a separate proceeding entirely, and as of this writing BrowserGate's own updates page hasn't reflected any change there. Different theory, different jurisdiction, different regulator. Nothing about Tuesday's order touches it. So practically: nothing changes. The scan list didn't shrink. The scanning didn't stop. If you want to see what LinkedIn currently checks your browser for, the local extension checker I mentioned last time still works, still runs locally, still doesn't phone home. If you're on Firefox or a hardened Chromium fork, you were never in scope to begin with — see the original post for the browser breakdown. Whether Farrell and Ganan can amend their way past a judge who's already told them how this ends is the thing worth watching — not this week's headlines. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social