LinkedIn is being sued by advertising companies in the United States, accusing it of inflating advertisers' views on its platform. The parties claim that the social network inflated views of sponsored videos in order to charge thousands of dollars to its clients.

The process is led by the groups TopDevz Inc and Noirefy Inc, two digital marketing platforms that use Linkedin to count the simple display of a video post on the timeline as views, without necessarily considering whether or not the user watched the content shown.

According to the companies, the failure to count LinkedIn views would have resulted in a 90% increase in advertisers' charges, potentially amounting to more than 418.000 additional charges. The parties are seeking reimbursement for this amount.

The lawsuit caused a legal impasse on Tuesday (3/8) in San Jose, California, after the court ruled that there was no fraud on the part of Linkedin. Despite the conclusion, the accusing parties were given a deadline to try to prove that Linkedin in fact inflated the number of views to profit even more from advertisers.

The parties must rely on the theory that bot traffic, erroneous clicks and fraudulent clicks were counted by Linkedin.

Leaks and security breaches

LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft in 2016 for approximately US$26 billion (R$139 billion). Despite the investment, the world's leading corporate social network has suffered from scandals involving information leaks and flaws in its advertising protocols.

In addition to inflating advertisers' views, in June 2021, a report from RestorePrivacy revealed a leak of data from approximately 92% of its users, totaling approximately 700 million affected accounts.

The leak did not include passwords, but personal data of users, including information such as email addresses, full names, telephone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation records, username and profile URL, education and professional experience, accounts and usernames of other social networks, and even salary expectations.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. Reuters

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