Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is why I run ad blockers. It's pretty wild that we live in a world where the actual FBI has recommended we use ad blockers to protect ourselves, and if everyone actually listened, much of the Internet (and economy) as we know it would disappear. The FBI is like "you should protect yourself from the way that the third largest company in the world does business", and the average person's response is "nah, that w…
Ad blockers focus on ads, not fingerprinting.
LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
461–470 of 836 posts
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#462The 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…
Javascript can query chrome extensions [1] and much more [2].
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#463Separate question, why isn't this kind of stuff something the browser restricts access to or puts behind an approval gate to the end user?
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#464>The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it. OMG is literally every article written with LLMs these days I just can't anymore. It's all so tiring.
I get it — it can be frustrating to encounter so much low effort AI content these days. But I think it’s worth looking at the bright side here: the increase in our production of entropy from GPU consumption will hasten the heat death of the universe. Would you like me to suggest some AI summarizer tools you could use to more efficiently read AI generated content in the meantime?
> I get it —
well done
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#465>The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it. OMG is literally every article written with LLMs these days I just can't anymore. It's all so tiring.
This is incredibly normal language and quite close to how I would write this quote, so what makes you think this is LLM text?
Is it actually stylistically close to how you'd write it? If I reformulate your comment in slop style I'd do something like:
The language is natural. Normal. Human. Who could question its authenticity?
The original example isn't the worst offender, but even small offenders stick out when you can't escape seeing this kind of thing everywhere.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time, As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.
You mean the internet you pay to access and which was around before the ads were even on it? That internet? I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief. Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet: a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs b) a few years later a new guy called commercial busin…
I mean yeah, you pay for the internet. But many sites are free to use only due to ads.
Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.
I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.
But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it would necessarily have to be six bucks a month. Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads). I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,
Yes, but the Awful registration fee is more like a speedbump to make banned behavior at least a little expensive to the offending users. Most of the revenue comes from completely optional aesthetic purchases: avatars, avatars _for others_, smilies, etc. I suspect it's a whale based economy.
True, I think it was more sort of a natural filter than explicitly revenue for the website.
Still, I would be willing to pay a bit more for a website that I actually like if it's a one-time fee; I actually paid for the "Platinum" membership for Something Awful so that I would have access to search, and a custom icon, so I think the total damage was around $30.
Dunno, I guess I just feel like people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think the fact that the only way that companies can really compete for people's time is giving it away for free [1] is a testament that most stuff on the internet is actually kind of shit.
[1] yeah I know something something you are the product something something.
ETA: I hate self-promotion but a friend of mine told me I should mention that I did write a blog post talking about this very specific example: https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results Why exactly does Chrome even allow this in the first place!? This is the most surprising takeaway for me here, given browser vendors' focus on hardening against fingerprinting.
Firefox FTW. I was relieved to find this was a Chrome-only problem.
Turns out Firefox has a similar issue, despite mitigations :( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372288
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time, As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.
You mean the internet you pay to access and which was around before the ads were even on it? That internet? I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief. Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet: a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs b) a few years later a new guy called commercial busin…
> a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs
"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#470Is there evidence that they use that information for anything other than browser fingerprinting or fraud detection?
That seems like the most obvious use case? Or maybe I missed something in the write up.