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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#351

Post by toomuchtodo »

II2II wrote: post #333
toomuchtodo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay f…

> Free does not scale No disagreement there, except the early web was not about scale. The sites you visited may have been created by someone as a hobby, a university professor outlining their courses or research, a government funded organization opening up their resources to the public, a non-profit organization providing information to the public or other professionals, or companies providing information and suppor…

I agree there are hobbyists, for lack of a better term, who will always share for free "for the love of the game", passion, whatever you want to call it. Nothing stops them from doing this passion or charity work today, the evidence of that is clear from the content we see daily pass through /new here. That was never really ad driven, nor would it be in the future, and numerous mechanisms remain for them to share this content for free with the world. But that is a small minority of today's Internet and consumption of data, information, and content (imho).

How does HN exist? Wealthy benefactors. Do I appreciate it any less? I do not, I am very grateful. But solutions are needed where a wealthy benefactor has not stepped in or does not exist, a commercial business model is untenable, the government does not or will not fund it, and the scale is beyond a single person spending a few hours a week on it for free.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#352

Post by glenstein »

Someone wrote: post #139
glenstein wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also try to profile for things like political beliefs.

I don’t see this article showing that. They query for extensions that could be used to do that, and that likely already is illegal, but those queries could solely be used to uniquely identify users (grabbing more bits makes it less likely to get collisions)

From the "Why It's Illegal" section:

>Political opinions

>LinkedIn scans for Anti-woke (“The anti-wokeness extension. Shows warnings about woke companies”), Anti-Zionist Tag (“Adds a tag to the LinkedIn profiles of Anti-Zionists”), Vote With Your Money (“showing political contributions from executives and employees”), No more Musk (“Hides digital noise related to Elon Musk,” 19 users), Political Circus (“Politician to Clown AI Filter,” 7 users), LinkedIn Political Content Blocker, and NoPolitiLinked.

>Each of these extensions reveals a political position. If LinkedIn detects any of them, it has collected data revealing that person’s political opinions. Article 9 prohibits this.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#353

Post by susupro1 »

lxgr wrote: post #257
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…

> 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.

[dead]

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#354

Post by kitsune1 »

spopejoy wrote: post #329
VladVladikoff wrote: post #69

>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.

> It's all so tiring. What's tiring is a comment like this. If you don't like the article don't read it -- and don't comment.

[dead]

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#355

Post by OhMeadhbh »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #299
surajrmal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But those websites would have to provide 5.99 a month of value, and many don't. We used to have "static" banners on sites, that would just loop through a predefined list on every refresh, same for every user, and it worked. Not for millions of revenue, but enough to pay for that phpbb hosting. The advertisers started with intrusive tracking, and the sites started with putting 50 ads around a maybe paragraph of usable…

Nary a month goes by that I don't bemoan the loss of BYTE and Dr Dobbs Journal. WIRED is still hanging on, but it's more of a site where tech warehouses in Shenzhen hawk there latest wares.

There was a time when Boing Boing was a decent little print magazine. And the web site went a decade before turning into... whatever the heck it is now.

And Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000 were "guaranteed unreadable," but they were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing style and technology.

I'm old enough to remember typing BASIC games from COMPUTE! into my C64 and reading about the latest Star Trek film in Starlog.

I sing the praises of Omni, even though it was clear they were probably snorting a lot of cocaine in their offices.

I can't be the only one who remembers Computer Shopper, but I have to admit it was years before I realized they had a bit of content and were more than just an ad sheet for Micro Center.

PC World wasn't my jam, but I respected the role it played. UnixWorld and Info World were more my thing.

And I even read the stories and articles in Playboy in the 70s. Believe it or not, they had some amazing authors publish stories there.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#356

Post by gfody »

array_key_first wrote: post #304
surajrmal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I believe this and it makes a web 3.0 solution seem viable if only we could escape the collective action trap

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#357

Post by dylan604 »

Panda4 wrote: post #152
dylan604 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a Chrome-based browser? Isn't Chrome Google's Chromium based browser? How many are based on Chrome?

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

[flagged]

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#358

Post by iso1631 »

dmoose wrote: post #197
taneq wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google cares deeply about privacy. Google defines privacy as them not giving your private data that they have collected to anyone else unless you ask them to.

Google cares deeply about privacy. Google defines privacy as them not giving your private data that they have collected to anyone who hasn't paid them for it or can compel them to give it up.

Why would the police go to all that hassle of compelling google to give it up when it can simply buy it on the open market.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#360

Post by Ikatza »

mikkupikku wrote: post #29
Ajedi32 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn is a job board so that seems unlikely.

Are you kidding? They've probably been selling a datastream of who in the company has been job searching to company HR departments the whole time. Search for a job on LinkedIn and I bet anybody with a paid corporate account can find that out if they care to.

If they have been doing that, they haven't offered it to me, which seems weird since I'm their ICP.

The simpler explanation is that they aren't doing that.

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