211–220 of 836 posts
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 would put it more like: it sounds bad, and it's no different from what others do, so they're all that bad.
The fact that they're working around an API limitation doesn't make this better, it just proves that they're up to no good. The whole reason there isn't an API for this is to prevent exactly this sort of enumeration.
It's clear that companies will do as much bad stuff as they can to make money. The fact that you can do this to work around extension enumeration limits should be treated as a security bug in Chrome, and fixed. And, while it doesn't really make a difference, LinkedIn should be considered to be exploiting a security vulnerability with this code.
>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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox-based browsers not affected.
Hmm I opened linkedin in Firefox and ublock origin showed it blocked 4 items... then switched away and back and the counter was up to 12. Is that enough blocking, I wonder?
>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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing to patch, scanning is not possible. It's either the extension's choice to become detectable ("externally_connectable" is off by default) or it makes unique changes to websites that allow for its detection.
If it were just a matter of detecting changes to the DOM then this could only detect extensions that alter the LinkedIn website itself. I agree that would be much harder to make undetectable, but this seems like it goes beyond that.
All of these are opt-in by the extensions and MV3 actually force you to specify which domains can access your extension. So, again, each extension must explicitly allow the web to find it.
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…
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…