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LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

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Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#681

Post by bookofjoe »

al_borland wrote: post #61
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’ve come to mostly expect this behavior from most websites that run advertising code and this is why I run ad blockers. Expecting and accepting this kind of thing is why everyone feels the need to run an ad-blocker. An ad-blocker also isn’t full protection. It’s a cat and mouse game. Novel ideas on how to extract information about you, and influence behavior, will never be handled by ad-blockers until it becomes k…

>... everyone feels the need to run an ad-blocker.

I don't: never have and never will. I don't notice the ads, they don't bother or distract me: I'm online 4-8 hours/day.

diaphimisticophobia: fear of advertisements or commercials

I would bet HN has the highest proportion of people with diaphimisticophobia of any group on the planet.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#682

Post by thephyber »

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #537
dobs_bob wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Brave backed by Peter Thiel? That alone would make me not trust it but they also have baked in crypto and other weird stuff.

Here is a handy list of things that Thiel invested in PayPal, Spotify, Stripe, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook, ResearchGate, Flexport, Nubank, Rippling, Asana, Luft, Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX You can’t trust anything these days!

I don’t think you can write off Apple or Microsoft just because Thiel made some investment in them.

Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#683

Post by abustamam »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #362
abustamam wrote: post #324

Earlier 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…

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?

I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#684

Post by hn_acc1 »

lejalv wrote: post #659
franktankbank wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

After getting laid off at age 52 (2nd time, 1st time day after my 50th birthday, took an inter-company transfer), and searching for a year, applying to maybe 5-10 companies a week, I got my current job (2 years+) through a random LinkedIn button.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#685

Post by acdha »

integralid wrote: post #420
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…

>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.

I strongly believe in paying journalists but I started blocking ads after nytimes.com served me a Windows malware download from a Doubleclick domain. It couldn’t have harmed my Mac but it was clear that the adtech industry had no interest in cleaning shop if it cost them a dime in revenue.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#686

Post by janalsncm »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #260
lxgr wrote: post #248

All I'm seeing is that Chrome apparently is failing to properly sandbox websites against extension fingerprinting. Sure, this can be solved at the legal layer, but in this case, there seems to be a much simpler and more effective technical solution, so why not pursue that instead?

Well, the developers of Chrome aren't exactly incentivized to prevent tracking (though perhaps tracking done by their competitors). But anyway, you can try to prevent it with a technical solution while also being outraged that they did it. If someone has their home broken into, perhaps they should have better locks, but the burglar is still responsible for their actions.

Just because a farmer eats beef doesn’t mean he won’t fend off wolves.

I agree on the practical aspect though.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#688

Post by kittikitti »

AmazingTurtle wrote: post #190

6 months ago I already posted about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45349476

Thank you for that post, it describes the invasion of privacy at a deeper level. I must have missed it but YCombinator is filled with people with a vested interest in keeping the clown show going.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#690

Post by traderj0e »

lxgr wrote: post #248

All I'm seeing is that Chrome apparently is failing to properly sandbox websites against extension fingerprinting. Sure, this can be solved at the legal layer, but in this case, there seems to be a much simpler and more effective technical solution, so why not pursue that instead?

Is it that easy?

  Chrome extensions can expose internal files to web pages through the web_accessible_resources field in their manifest.json. When an extension is installed and has exposed a resource, a fetch() request to chrome-extension://{id}/{file} will succeed. When the extension is not installed, Chrome blocks the request and the promise rejects.
This looks intentional enough that I wonder if there's a legit reason for it.
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