BrowserGate: Claims of LinkedIn ‘Spying’ Clash With Security Research Findings

By Kevin Townsend for SecurityWeek
Tuesday, April 14, 2026

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This doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is absolved from all criticism of its behavior. It hasn’t made the process clear to its users. Whether It is intentionally engaged in fingerprinting or profiling its users or not, the action gets close to illegality in certain jurisdictions.

“The legality of such fingerprinting depends on the facts and jurisdiction,” comments Ilia Kolochenko, a lawyer focused on cybersecurity, data protection and privacy law, told SecurityWeek. “If used without notice and for commercial gain, in some countries, it may even constitute a criminal offense. In any case, if you don’t have a freely given and informed user consent to collect such data – that highly likely amounts to personal data under GDPR and most other privacy laws and regulations – the data collection may be a grave infringement of applicable privacy law.”

It would seem that LinkedIn should make its behavior very clear to its users, and that signing up is consenting to the process. But for Reguly, “I think the only downside I see is that LinkedIn wasn’t notifying you that you had these potentially problematic extensions installed.”

Personally, he writes, “I think that administrators and security folks should be celebrating this revelation – they now have a list of Extension IDs that they should block at their organization.”

But on the more sensationalist claims for BrowserGate, he concludes, “I can’t help but look at this as a giant nothingburger.” Read Full Article