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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#651

Post by btown »

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…

For what it's worth - and I'm not saying that LinkedIn is doing this for the right reasons - I can imagine a frontend QA team wanting to do this to understand how prominent certain extensions are for users of various parts of their product, correlating those extensions against frontend bug reports, and using that to guide QA procedures with real-world extension sets.

When you're literally the company that invented Kafka for your clickstreams, "everything looks like a nail."

(More likely, though, this is an anti-scraping initiative, since headless browsers are unlikely to randomize their use of extensions, and they can use this to identify potential scrapers.)

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#652

Post by cogman10 »

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…

> It also seems like what I’d expect to find in modern browser fingerprinting code.

Exactly what I think it is. It's all for tracking and ultimately for advertisement. Linkedin can get exactly who you are and then they share that data with ad companies to better target you.

Really gross behavior.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#653

Post by crazygringo »

Beestie wrote: post #648
crazygringo wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the path for that to even happen? Are companies now commonly uploading lists of employees to LinkedIn? Is this happening automatically because you got an e-mail account from the company and the company runs on MS Office and you're identified as am employee within it? What triggered it? This seems like somewhat of a scandal that deserves its own post, but it also needs a lot more details to be trustworthy and f…

I rather suspect the information was siphoned to linkedin from the payroll company the consulting firm was using. While there are a zillion small consulting firms, there are a small number of firms which process their payroll (whether to employees or independent contractors like myself). I have no evidence to back this up but after thinking it through, it made more sense than every little mom/pop/medium size niche co…

Interesting. That's a possibility... but how much information did the LinkedIn account have? Did it have your full job title? I'm not sure how much information is shared with payroll providers.

Again, there's no real reporting on the internet of LinkedIn creating profiles for people without their consent. If you have any documentation and details, this is the kind of thing worth posting here in full detail and/or contacting a journalist about. Of course, if it was in the past you might not have any of that info anymore.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#654

Post by cogman10 »

macNchz wrote: post #519
ronsor wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive, and don't waste my time, so I earn you some money" But ads are all of those things now, so I feel no obligation. I only got an ad blocker around the time ads were becoming excessively irritating.

Beyond just invasive/annoying, ad networks explicitly spread malware and scams/fraud. There's not much incentive for them to clamp down on it, though, as that would cost them money both in lost revenue and in paying for more thorough review.

It'd not even be hard for them to stop it, but they just had to be annoying instead.

When I first started out on the internet, ads were banners. Literally just images and a link that you could click on to go see some product. That was just fine.

However, that wasn't good enough for advertisers. They needed animations, they needed sounds, they needed popups, they needed some way to stop the user from just skimming past and ignoring the ad. They wanted an assurance that the user was staring at their ad for a minimum amount of time.

And, to get all those awful annoying capabilities, they needed the ability to run code in the browser. And that is what has opened the floodgate of malware in advertisement.

Take away the ability for ads to be bundled with some executable and they become fine again. Turn them back into just images, even gifs, and all the sudden I'd be much more amenable to leaving my ad blocker off.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#655

Post by worik »

jcgrillo wrote: post #431
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…

You can't actually push back as an IC. Tech companies aren't structured that way. There's no employment protection of any kind, at least in the US. So the most you can do is protest and resign, or protest and be fired. Either way, it'll cost you your job. I've paid that price and it's steep. There's no viable "grassroots" solution to the problem, it needs to come from regulation. Managers need to serve time in prison…

> There's no viable "grassroots" solution to the problem, it needs to come from regulation. Managers need to serve time in prison,

No, yes

Yes, giving these people short (or long, mēh) prison sentences is the only thing that will stop this.

No, the obvious grassroots response is to not use LinkedIn or Chrome. (You mean developers not consumers, I think. The developers in the trenches should obey if they need their jobs, they are not to blame. It is the evil swine getting the big money and writing the big cheque's...)

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#656

Post by gettingoverit »

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…

Well, that's precisely what is sinister here.

Those profiling tools don't really care which features are going to be used for predictions. It's just machine learning, and it's indiscriminate. So if you have an extension that correlates with you being Muslim, it will be used for whatever ML predictions they give to other companies, and the worst case will be another "oh we didn't do this intentionally".

Of course, that's not the first time this ever happened in human history, so even if it's not "something inherently sinister", it's just "criminal negligence".

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#657

Post by worik »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #647
orochimaaru wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One works for money. And money is important. Ethics isn’t going pay mortgage, send kids to university and all that other stuff. I’m not going to do things that are obviously illegal. But if I get a requirement that needs to be met and then the company legal team is responsible for the outcome. In short, you are not going to solve this problem blaming developer ethics. You need regulation. To get the right regulation…

You are transfering moral agency from yourself, to the government. Will you do the same for your kids ? WOuld you let the government decide for you whats right, and what's wrong ?

> You are transfering moral agency from yourself, to the government

That is the deal in a state based society. There are alternatives, but are you ready for Council Communism and it's ilk?

> WOuld you let the government decide for you whats right, and what's wrong ?

Yes, in a state based society

In a state based society fight for democracy and civil rights. Freedom must be defended

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#659

Post by lejalv »

franktankbank wrote: post #424
lejalv wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But LinkedIn is the one social network many people literally cannot escape to put food on the table. I don't care about how much spying is going on in ESPN. I can ditch it at the shadow of a suspicion. Not so with LinkedIn. This is very alarming, and pretending it's not because everyone else does it sounds disingenuous to me.

That sounds problematic and is only supported by people mindlessly agreeing to it. I know someone who got jobs at google and apple with no linkedin, and he wasn't particularly young. What do you do in the face of it? I say quit entirely. It was an easy decision because I got nothing out of it during the entire time I was on it.

I have heard people say that LinkedIn was vital to their career.

For myself, I agree with you: one should quit (and I will)

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#660

Post by sdeframond »

turtletontine wrote: post #591
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…

> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. One reason your boss is eager to replace everyone with language models, they won’t have any “ethical backbone” :’)

No-one replaced developers when we got IDEs and CIs and such. We just produced more software faster.

Same with LLMs. This is a race. Competent people are in demand.

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