LinkedIn Users Fire Back at Motion to Dismiss Email Privacy Class Action

Users respond to LinkedIn’s motion to dismiss their privacy class action lawsuit, saying they can’t be blamed for LinkedIn’s spam tactics.

Plaintiffs who allege that LinkedIn’s marketing practices illegally accessed their email accounts and misrepresented their use of the service as an endorsement to contacts fired back at the company’s motion to dismiss their class action lawsuit, accusing the Silicon Valley firm of trying to pin the blame on users.

“LinkedIn alleges users should have known, based on cryptic language on LinkedIn’s sign-up screens (e.g. ‘add to network’), that LinkedIn would download email addresses from users’ third-party email accounts, indefinitely store [them], and send multiple solicitation emails advertising LinkedIn,” the plaintiffs say in their Jan. 13 opposition. “Tellingly, LinkedIn does not and cannot argue its terms of service (which until this case was filed, were hidden from users) disclosed LinkedIn’s email and data harvesting and endorsement advertising practices.”

Users sued LinkedIn September 2013, accusing the social network of hacking into users’ email accounts and downloading email addresses to send out unauthorized emails to nonusers of the social networking site “in a relentless effort to enroll new users and sell premium memberships.”

They say LinkedIn tells its users that it will never “email anyone without your permission,” and they want the social network to pay up for using their private information to “grow its user base, sell premium memberships, and increase their profitability by avoiding expensive member acquisition costs.”

LinkedIn motioned to dismiss the class action lawsuit in December, calling the allegations “mertiless.” The company said users should “understand that, by clicking ‘Allow’ and ‘Add Connections,’ they were consenting to the challenged actions,” and the complaint did “not allege how any of these selected words or phrases are false or misleading.”

In their response, the plaintiffs say that the term “invite [contacts who aren’t on LinkedIn] to connect with you” is not clear that their entire email address book will be accessed and used by LinkedIn for marketing purposes.

Further, the class action lawsuit notes that the login screens state, “We will not store your password or email anyone without your permission.” However, the software LinkedIn uses can reportedly access email accounts when a user remains logged in in the same brower, even if they’re not on the site, and harvests all email addresses used in the person’s address book.

The basis for pleading a case involving fraud must meet heightened standards, or the “who, what, where and why” of the alleged illegal actions. Legal representatives for the California plaintiffs say they have described the conditions with enough particularity to survive a motion to dismiss.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the LinkedIn privacy class action lawsuit has been filed, has handled Internet privacy cases involving a number of Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google. In those cases, the district court found that while contract language indicated the collection of personal data in the fine print, those disclosures were often not clear enough to a reasonable consumer.

Specifically, the plaintiffs’ motion says that to accept LinkedIn’s motion to dismiss would mean believing “that a few cryptic disclosures on a web site provide [the company] the right to harvest users’ email addresses and broadcast users’ persona to hundreds of people [which] offends the principles enunciated in privacy laws.”

Further, while the plaintiffs note that they may accept disclosing certain information, overall, “when consent [of personal data] is implied,” the court had previously decided that “it should be ‘construed narrowly.'”

The plaintiffs are represented by class action attorneys Larry C. Russ, Dorian S. Berger and Daniel P. Hipskind of Russ August & Kabat.

The LinkedIn Privacy Class Action Lawsuit is Paul Perkins, et al. v. LinkedIn Corp., Case No. 5:13-cv-04303, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

UPDATE: On June 11, 2015, LinkedIn informed a California federal judge that it had agreed to pay $13 million to settle the email harvesting class action lawsuit.

UPDATE 2: The LinkedIn email harvesting class action lawsuit was preliminarily approved on Sept. 15, 2015.

UPDATE 3: Details on how to file a claim for the LinkedIn Add Connections class action settlement are up! See them here.

UPDATE 4/20/16: The LinkedIn Add Connections Class Action Settlement is currently under appeal.  Claims will not be paid until all appeals are exhausted.  We appreciate your ongoing  patience. Top Class Actions will continue to provide updates as we learn more.  Keep checking back and let us know when you receive a check in the comments section below or on our  Facebook page.

UPDATE 5: On Oct. 17, 2016, Top Class Actions readers who submitted valid claims for the LinkedIn add connections class action settlement started receiving checks worth as much as $20.43! Congratulations to all our viewers who got PAID!