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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#591

Post by turtletontine »

ryandrake wrote: post #230
haswell wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. If this was happening, the magnitude of the scandal would be hard to overstate. But this is not happening. What actually is happening is still a problem. But the hyperbole underm…

> What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available. > To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed. These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What t…

> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects.

One reason your boss is eager to replace everyone with language models, they won’t have any “ethical backbone” :’)

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#592

Post by michaelt »

ronsor wrote: post #480
integralid wrote: post #420

Earlier 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.

The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive, and don't waste my time, so I earn you some money" But ads are all of those things now, so I feel no obligation. I only got an ad blocker around the time ads were becoming excessively irritating.

> The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive

Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too.

You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#593

Post by OkayPhysicist »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #534
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For you personally, to solve this issue in particular? Use Firefox. Google is evil, and there's a good chunk of the Chrome team who are actively enemy combatants. For the broader issue of not wanting to give even the information you'd need to choose to share to LinkedIn? Network the good ol' fashioned way: talking to random strangers in San Francisco bars.

> there's a good chunk of the Chrome team who are actively enemy combatants Uh what.

Everyone involved in Chrome's most questionable decisions such as Manifest V3's anti-adblocking, the Topics API, etc, are not just working orthogonal to the people's interest, they are directly working against it. I couched my statement down from the entirety of the Chrome team because I hesitate to label "making constant, marginal feature additions that ultimately result in anti competitive behavior" openly malicious.

Everyone from the suit that made the ultimate calls down to the lowest code monkey who bugfixed such features are responsible for their choice to target the good, common user of the internet. I'm not asking for altruism, I just think people shouldn't choose to do evil, and that those who do anyway should be recognized as such.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#594

Post by autoexec »

iso1631 wrote: post #575
autoexec wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police do hit up google for data though. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

So no compelling here. The police asked for it and google gave it, either for free or in exchange for money. They didn't say "no" to the police, they didn't wait for a court order. The bad guy here is google. And the people that champion data collection by private companies because of free market == good.

In that case, the main bad guy was the police who didn't bother to do even the most basic investigating after "check Google's GPS records to see who was at the house" including "Check Google's GPS records to see how how long they were there" which would have shown them this was a drive by, but yeah Google is absolutely a villain

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#596

Post by eipi10_hn »

cwmma wrote: post #311
mcv wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is JavaScript running in a page even allowed to know what extensions I have? Is this also what sites use to see I've got an ad blocker? Just run everything in a safe environment that it can't look out of.

The page isn't allowed to know what extensions you have, instead LinkedIn is looking for various evidence that extensions are installed, like if an extension was to create a specific html element, LinkedIn could look for evidence of that element being there. Since the extensions are running on the same page as LinkedIn (some of them are explicitly modifying the LinkedIn the website) it's impossible to sandbox them so…

Page can know what your chrome extensions are, even when your extensions don't interact with the site, by fetching `web_accessible_resources`: https://browserleaks.com/chrome#web-accessible-resources-det... . uBO mitigates this partly by generating internal secret tokens for each request: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/master/src/web_access... .

However, there are other proof of concept of another attack vector to bypass this by using timing difference when fetching those resources.

I help maintaining uBO's lists and I've seen one real world case doing this. It's a trash shortener site, and they use the `web_accessible_resources` method as one of their anti-adblock methods. Since it's a trash site, I didn't care much later.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#597

Post by GrinningFool »

johanyc wrote: post #555
cousin_it wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe supply chain attacks are coming btw.

Wdym? You vibe code your software. Are you saying the LLM will spit out malware?

Sooner or later, yes. What stops it , other than layers of imperfect process? And it's the perfect vector to exploit anyone who doesn't review and understand the generated code before running it locally

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#598

Post by echelon »

al_borland wrote: post #61
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’ve come to mostly expect this behavior from most websites that run advertising code and this is why I run ad blockers. Expecting and accepting this kind of thing is why everyone feels the need to run an ad-blocker. An ad-blocker also isn’t full protection. It’s a cat and mouse game. Novel ideas on how to extract information about you, and influence behavior, will never be handled by ad-blockers until it becomes k…

LinkedIn's whole business model is gatekeeping their database.

They're scanning your extensions to make sure you aren't using third party tools to scrape LinkedIn.

It's stupid, but they're trying to stop people from making money on LinkedIn when they feel like they're the only ones that should be able to do that.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#600

Post by GrinningFool »

luxuryballs wrote: post #247
gwerbin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly they are using that for audience segmentation and ad targeting. Clever and disgusting. This isn't the invention of some evil moustache-twirling executive, this was the invention of an employee or group of employees who value money more than morals. We should think of such employees as henchmen.

if they do a better job at showing me an ad that might be relevant to me, how is that disgusting? if I have to see an ad at all I at least want them to give it their best shot

The rules say we should default to assuming good faith in comments. But it's hard when I see this comment in 2026.
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