>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.
How can you tell?
LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
411–420 of 836 posts
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#412The 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…
> 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…
The crazier part is that its an official government position, and we (people at large / the government) aren't immediately slapping down the actions of these companies.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be very happy with an internet without ads. Not that I see any ads anyway.
I think the damage is there even if you don't see the ads. News outlets and organizations that used to be magazine publishers focus on lowest common denominator stories they know will get the highest engagement. That usually means sexy anger-bait. Sure we had that in the print times, but we had a lot more "slow" content that you could sit with and contemplate over a day, week or month.
> publishers focus on lowest common denominator stories they know will get the highest engagement
One of my favorite uses of AI is to ask it, "what are today's headlines?" You completely bypass all of the sensational nonsense.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#415Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#416[deleted]
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#418> The headline seems pretty misleading.
No it isn't. Performing fingerprinting on user's devices, to ultimately profit of financially or worse is misleading. Especially doing this while knowing the user isn't aware what this really means and just deciding it for them.
The headline is just an exaggerated way of saying what is really happening.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the fake drama. Punchy sentences. Contrast . And then? A banal payoff.
Human journalists and marketing copy writers have been writing like this for at least 50 years, if not considerably longer. I am exhausted by so many people calling writing out as AI without sufficient proof other than writing style. Some things are more obvious, sure... maybe I'm just too stupid to see a lot of the rest of it? But so much of what gets called out seems incredibly familiar to me compared with traditio…
You're right that (some) marketing copy writers have been writing in this style for decades, but suddenly every second tech blogger has assumed the same voice in the past 2 years. Not everyone is as sensitive to it. I read this crap daily so I've developed an awareness and I'm confident in calling it out.
I don't think I've personally seen a single false positive on HN. If anything, too much slop goes through uncontested.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#420The 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…
> 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…
>the average person's response is "nah, that would take at least a couple of minutes of my time,
As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.