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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

browsergate.eu

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#361

Post by haswell »

nightpool wrote: post #274
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…

> I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. Yes, but I also think that most people would interpret "Getting a full list of all the Chrome extensions you have installed" as a meaningful escape/violation of the browser's privacy sandbox. The fact that there's no getAllExtensions API is deliberate. The fact…

> I also think that most people would interpret "Getting a full list of all the Chrome extensions you have installed" as a meaningful escape/violation of the browser's privacy sandbox

I think that’s a far more reasonable framing of the issue.

> I don't think describing it as something everybody would expect is totally fine and normal for browsers to allow is correct.

I agree that most people would not expect their extensions to be visible. I agree that browsers shouldn’t allow this. I, and most privacy/security focused people I know have been sounding the alarm about Chrome itself as unsafe if you care about privacy for awhile now.

This is still a drastically different thing than what the title implies.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#362

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't.

The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#363

Post by II2II »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #325
jamespo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders, who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay.

There is no substance to this statement. > Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders Citation needed. > who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay Why is this relevant? People try to get free stuff all over the place and I don't find it makes my life difficult.

>> Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders

> Citation needed.

I think we need to agree upon a definition of freeloader before citing sources to support the claim. I've found that many people who use the word have a much more transactional view of the world than I do.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#364

Post by calgarymicro »

cbeach wrote: post #347
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]

No, they mean Anti-Zionist Tag[0], an extension that is live on the Chrome Web Store and identifies anti-Zionists for the benefit of Zionists.

[0]https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anti-zionist-tag/ek...

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#365

Post by phendrenad2 »

replwoacause wrote: post #41
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 disagree, I think we should push back hard on behavior like this. What business is it of LinkedIn's what browser extensions I have installed? I think the framing for this is appropriate.

So why not say that LinkedIn is murdering people? I mean, if all you care about is raising awareness with maximal clickbait...

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#366

Post by Forgeties79 »

Xirdus wrote: post #285
Rychard wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on Android supports it without any issue. That would cover a significant enough segment of the population that it might encourage actual change in the industry if people started moving to that platform.

Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.

The point is it’s easy. It’s near frictionless. Unlike a lot of pie in the sky statements I see here like how “easy” it is to install and run Linux (it isn’t), Firefox adoption is truly trivial for any smartphone user and presents a stronger baseline than chrome does. People here often get critical of Firefox/Mozilla, and I totally get it, but compared to Google Chrome it doesn’t, well, compare.

Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#367

Post by x0x0 »

jamesgill wrote: post #226

https://browsergate.eu/extensions/ It seems to not scan for Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin, two extensions I rely on. That's...surprising.

Because what they're scanning for is scrapers. So much linkedin scraping. And I'd bet that the majority of the innocuous-looking extensions are scrapers hidden as other extensions to get users to unknowingly use them.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#368

Post by saghm »

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…

> 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.

The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#369

Post by compiler-guy »

justonceokay wrote: post #254
chii wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the language of "your computer" implies files on your computer, as it would be what people commonly call it. Merely just the extension is not enough. If it has the ability to scan your bookmarks, or visited site history, that would lend more credence to using the term "computer". The title ought to have said "linkedIn illegally scans your browser", and that would make clear what is being done without being sensat…

Are you defending LinkedIn’s behavior right now or are you just happy to be more technically correct (the best kind of correct!) than those around you? Trying to understand the angle

Something may be bad, but accurately describing why it is bad significantly elevates the discourse.

Eg, someone could use the phrase "Won't someone think of the children?" to describe a legitimately bad thing like bank fraud, but the solutions that flow from the problem that "children are in danger" are significantly different from the solutions that flow from "phishing attacks are rampant".

The two issues in this case aren't quite as different as child-endangerment and bank fraud. But if the problem was as the original title describes, the solution is quite different (better sandboxing) than what the actual solution is. Which I don't know, but better sandboxing ain't it.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#370

Post by kjkjadksj »

arafeq wrote: post #4

[flagged]

It is pretty easy to signal stuff on linkedin without intending to do so. For example whenever I get an old coworker adding me on linkedin, they are 100% of the time job seeking. Inevitably they start a new role some weeks later.

All one has to do is just measure employees linkedin activity. I mean truthfully people don’t use the site at all if they aren’t actively looking for work. It is corporate dystopia otherwise. It is trivial to find these signals.

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