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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#571

Post by eipi10_hn »

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…

I'm happy to see that day. I'm already paying for stuff I need in life. There's no reasons to insist on not paying for the stuff I need in the web. Just kill those spywares stealing my personal actions and information.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#572

Post by tombert »

jcgrillo wrote: post #295
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…

> soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month No, I won't. I'll just stop using them. So will almost everyone. I don't think there's a single ad-supported product that would survive by converting to a paid subscription, because they're all so profoundly unnecessary.

Yeah, the fact that the only way that these products can survive in the competition of how I spend my time is a testament to how shitty they are.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#573

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

> sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re a Muslim”)

Then why search for PordaAI or Deen Shield? Or more specifically, since getAllExtensions() would return them, why would they be on the "scan list", instead of just ignored?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#574

Post by mikkupikku »

whimsicalism wrote: post #452
mikkupikku wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why is everyone online so incorrectly conspiratorial-minded nowadays? and no, there are not just way more conspiracies nowadays

Why give corps like Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, when you'll be right more often than not by accusing them of anything underhanded?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#575

Post by iso1631 »

autoexec wrote: post #544
iso1631 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Police do hit up google for data though. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

So no compelling here. The police asked for it and google gave it, either for free or in exchange for money. They didn't say "no" to the police, they didn't wait for a court order.

The bad guy here is google. And the people that champion data collection by private companies because of free market == good.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#577

Post by black3r »

Johnny555 wrote: post #499

>the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) Why should a website be able to scan for extensions at all? Or if there's a legitimate need (like linkedin.com wants to see if you installed the linkedin extension), leave it up to the extension to decide if it wants to reveal itself. The extension can register a list of U…

that's basically how it already works...

extensions choose on which site they're active and if they provide any available assets (e.g. some extensions modify CSS of the website by injecting their CSS, so that asset is public and then any website where the extension is active can call fetch("chrome-extension:///whatever/file/needed.css" if it knows the extension ID (fixed for each extension) and the file path to such asset... if the fetch result is 404, it can assume the extension is not installed, if the result is 200 it can assume the extension is installed.

This is what LinkedIn is doing... they have their own database of extension IDs and a known working file path, and they are just calling these fetches... they have been doing it for years, I've noticed it a few years back when I was developing a chrome extension which also worked with LinkedIn, but back then it was less than 100 extensions scanned, so I just assumed they want to detect specific extensions which break their site or their terms of use... now it's apparently 6000+ extensions...

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#578

Post by secondcoming »

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…

My biggest gripe is why these JS APIs even exist in the first place

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#579

Post by MidnightRider39 »

gzread wrote: post #560
MidnightRider39 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with Chrome i can use ublock - not so with safari. The best browser is ofc Firefox but everyone seems to have forgotten that bc of bad publicity or whatever

The best browser is either Waterfox or Librewolf since they're Firefox-based but don't steal your data or claim copyright on it.

It would be news to me that Firefox steals data or claims copyright on my data - do you have anything concrete to back that up?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#580

Post by michaelt »

mrguyorama wrote: post #500
ryandrake wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available. > To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed. These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What t…

I integrate these kinds of systems in order to prevent criminals from being able to use our ecommerce platform to utilize stolen credit cards. That involves integrating with tracking providers to best recognize whether a purchase is being made by a bot or not, whether it matches "Normal" signals for that kind of order, and importantly, whether the credit card is being used by the normal tracking identity that uses it…

> Even the GDPR gives us enormous leeway to do literally this, but it requires participating in tracking networks that have what amounts to a total knowledge of purchases and browsing you do on the internet. That's the only way they work at all.

That data sounds like it would be very valuable.

But I think if I sell widgets and a prospective customer browsers my site, telling my competitors (via a data broker) that customer is in the market for widgets is not a smart move.

How do such tracking networks get the cooperation of retailers, when it’s against the retailers interests to have their customers tracked?

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