Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

browsergate.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 836 posts

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#341

Post by garciansmith »

newsoftheday wrote: post #306
ronjouch wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ad blockers" nowadays do much more. From the horse’s mouth, which describes itself as a “wide-spectrum content blocker” [1]: “uBlock Origin (uBO) is a CPU and memory-efficient wide-spectrum content blocker for Chromium and Firefox. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc., by default using EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's Blocklist, Online Malicious URL Blocklist,…

I'd like to install uBlock Origin, when I try, Chrome warns it needs the permission to, "Read and change all your data on all websites". That seems excessive, to give that much power to one extension. I currently use no extensions to keep my security posture high.

I never get the fear behind extensions, at least not to the level where you wouldn't use an open-source extension that's extremely well vetted. And even if that isn't good enough for you, choosing to browse the web without using a content blocker is a far, far greater security risk.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#342

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

Aurornis wrote: post #228
tartoran wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And instead LinkedIn is scraping all users computers?

This doesn’t fit the description of scraping by any normal definition. It’s a classic feature probe structure, where the features happen to be scraping extensions. I think it’s kind of funny that HN has gone so reactionary at tech companies that the comments here have become twisted against the anti-spam measures instituted on a website that will never trigger on any of their PCs, because HN users aren’t installing L…

HackerNews users used to be the type that would do the scraping, so they could Hack the data into whatever format or integration they desired.

It's unfortunate to see folks here who don't support that – interoperability is at the heart of the Hacker Ethic. LinkedIn (along with any other big tech companies locking down and crippling their APIs) is wrong to even try to block it.

Is it an issue of the resources scrapers consume? No: Even ordinary users trying to get API access on a registered persistent account linked to their name are stymied in accessing their own data. LinkedIn simply doesn't want you to access your own data via API, or in any manner that isn't blessed by them. That ain't right.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#343

Post by dotancohen »

abustamam wrote: post #324
array_key_first wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield. I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month. Why does YouTube pr…

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of…

  > distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking
How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#344

Post by mrkeen »

surajrmal wrote: post #256
lastofthemojito wrote: post #147

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…

Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed ont…

No company would treat it as either-or.

If websites could charge 5.99/month, they would.

If a website was charging 5.99/month, they would not stop spying on you.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#345

Post by registeredcorn »

nickvec wrote: post #222
lastofthemojito wrote: post #147

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…

Majority of people use their mobile devices these days to browse the Internet. Installing an ad blocker on your iPhone is a significantly bigger challenge than on desktop.

Brave has served me well in this regard. I don't even get ads on YouTube on mobile.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#346

Post by kitsune1 »

GavinMcG wrote: post #209
grub5000 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incredibly normal language and quite close to how I would write this quote, so what makes you think this is LLM text?

It’s the fake drama. Punchy sentences. Contrast . And then? A banal payoff.

[dead]

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#347

Post by cbeach »

andersonpico wrote: post #11

this is a massive violation of trust > The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).

[flagged]

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#348

Post by davedx »

chromacity wrote: post #269
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’m not deeply familiar with what APIs are available for detecting extensions, but the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) vs. something inherently sinister This seems like a really weird argument to make. The fact that the platform doesn't provide a privacy-violating API is not an extenuating circumstance. Lin…

What are the religious-related extensions described in the article doing that's "evil"?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#349

Post by storus »

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…

Which browsers in which mode (normal/private) are affected?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#350

Post by acorn221 »

victor106 wrote: post #154
acorn221 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have! It's these developers either not knowing or not caring about it which is the issue! I did a blog post about this a while back showing how they do it, and how you can get around it, it's not very complex for the devs. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-linkedin-knows-which-chro...

> Chrome have fortunately recently released a "extension side panel" mode, and since only DOM changes can be easily identified, using the chrome extension side panel would be virtually un-detectable however this is far less intuitive to use and requires the user to perform some action to open the sidepanel every time they want to use the extension. As an end user I could not find an option to open the side panel

Yeah I mean it's not very commonly used by extensions. I quite like it as it's completely isolated and not detectable. I built my first extension which uses it as the primary interface yesterday: https://github.com/Am-I-Being-Pwned/PGP-Tools
Post reply on HN