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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#371

Post by Someone »

hedora wrote: post #253
Someone wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The list of queried extensions includes things that would be used by particular religious groups, and people with certain medical conditions.

The claim I replied to is “They try to profile for things like political beliefs”.

I wasn’t contesting that they query extensions that can be used for that purpose, or that they use query results for that purpose, but indicated that the fact that they make such queries doesn’t necessarily imply that they try to do such profiling.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#374

Post by KeshiaRose »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #251
j45 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go try it with fingerprint.com. Even post-sanitization, pi-hole, you name it, it will be surprising.

fingerprint.com seems to be some fingerprinting vendor, they don't even offer a demo without logging in. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org is EFFs demo site is non-profit and doesn't require login

This is the Fingerprint demo page (the page itself is a demo): https://fingerprint.com/demo There's also https://demo.fingerprint.com for use case specific demos and more detail on the API response.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#376

Post by oopsiremembered »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #259
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…

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…

The problem was less the scale of supply and more the scale of demand.

In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons found that, as coal became more readily and easily available, demand for it went up. This was counter to the theories of others, and the principle became known as Jevons Paradox.

Jevons Paradox (a concept that is widely misunderstood, especially when it comes to tech and finance bros talking about AI) demonstrates that, a resource becomes more abundant and easily accessible, demand for that resource rises. As the web took off, people hungered more and more for digital content -- especially as internet accessibility became faster and cheaper.

To keep up -- and to pay for being able to keep up -- increasingly sophisticated monetization models were introduced.

In any case, ad models are one thing. But it's the data brokering that's even more insidious.

The irony is that if internet content were harder to access, the population on the whole wouldn't want it as much.

Now, the culmination of Jevons Paradox has spun itself around a bit in this case. We now live in a world where those profiting off of ad models and data brokering actively try to get people to demand internet content more. (Look no further than the recent social-media-addiction lawsuits.)

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#377

Post by pluralmonad »

i_love_retros wrote: post #249
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…

[flagged]

When has infantilizing adults resulted in positive outcomes? What if the group of idiots decide you're the idiot and start making decisions for your own good?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#378

Post by taneq »

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.

Ah yes, I should have said I was describing the official line, not the behaviour. In all fairness the “can compel them to give it up” doesn’t seem to be optional but otherwise, yeah. Agreed.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#379

Post by nailer »

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 headline seems pretty misleading.

Yes. I was expecting LinkedIn was connecting to extensions that are using their exhanced privileges to scan your computer, per the "LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer" headline.

Instead, LinkedIn is scanning for extensions.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#380

Post by rchaud »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #259
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…

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…

Newspapers continue to run ads even after the paywalls went up everywhere a decade or so ago. Once "premium" offerings like HBO, which were ad-free on cable TV, now has ads on its paid streaming version. Even with the "premium" subscription tier, there's sponsored/co-branded content. And for some reason, it now has live sports, where they have no control over the ads shown.
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