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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

browsergate.eu

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#41

Post by replwoacause »

haswell wrote: post #14

The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…

I disagree, I think we should push back hard on behavior like this. What business is it of LinkedIn's what browser extensions I have installed? I think the framing for this is appropriate.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#42

Post by cedilla »

ericyd wrote: post #38

I don't like any of this, but I'm not totally clear how this is substantially different from other fingerprinting technologies which I assume are used by every large tech company. Could anyone elaborate? The post isn't very clear why this is different from other data surveillance.

If other people collect data like that it's probably also illegal.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#44

Post by Panda4 »

z3ratul163071 wrote: post #13

why would the browser ever expose extensions api to a web page. does firefox does this as well?

> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions.

It's not clear though, either they only tested against chrome-based browsers or Firefox isn't enabling them to do so.

edit: I answered before I go fully through the article but it does say it's only Chrome based.

> The extension scan runs only in Chrome-based browsers. The isUserAgentChrome() function checks for “Chrome” in the user agent string. The isBrowser() function excludes server-side rendering environments. If either check fails, the scan does not execute.

> This means every user visiting LinkedIn with Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, or any other Chromium-based browser is subject to the scan.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#50

Post by haswell »

replwoacause wrote: post #41
haswell wrote: post #14

The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…

I disagree, I think we should push back hard on behavior like this. What business is it of LinkedIn's what browser extensions I have installed? I think the framing for this is appropriate.

To broaden my point, I think we’d find that many websites we use are doing this.

My point isn’t that this is acceptable or that we shouldn’t push back against it. We should.

My point is that this doesn’t sound particularly surprising or unique to LinkedIn, and that the framing of the article seems a bit misleading as a result.

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