LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions • Hacker News Board

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#691

Post by fc417fc802 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #636

benregenspan wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm wondering is if this requires sending the full list of extensions straight to a server (as opposed to a more privacy-protecting approach like generating some type of hash clientside)? Based on their privacy policy, it looks like Sift (major anti-fraud vendor) collects only "number of plugins" and "plugins hash". No one can accuse them of collecting the plugins for some dual-use purpose beyond fingerprinting,…

The SOP of this entire industry is "Include this javascript link in your tag manager of choice", and it will run whatever javascript it can to collect whatever they want to collect. You then integrate in the back end to investigate the signals they sell you. America has no GDPR or similar law, so your "privacy" never enters the picture. They do not even think about it. This includes things like the motion of your mou…

Mandating that tracking for anti-fraud be vertically integrated with the payment network seems unnecessary. Surely the law could instead mandate the acceptable uses of such data? The issue at present appears to be the lack of regulation, not scofflaws.

I'm not convinced tracking is the only or even a very good way to go about this though. Mandating chip use would largely solve the issue as it currently stands (at least AFAIK). The card provider doing 2FA on their end prior to payment approval seems like it works just as well in practice.

At this point my expectation is that I have to do 2FA when first adding a new card to a platform. I'm not clear why they should need to track me at that point.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#692

Post by hn_acc1 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:22 PM UTC

amw-zero wrote: post #567

andersonpico wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? Calling the title misleading because they didn't breach the browser sandbox is wrong when this is clearly a scenario most people didn't think was possible. Chrome added extensionId randomization with the change to V3, so it's clearly not an intended scenario. > vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re…

It 100% implies that it's looking for locally installed binaries.

And could possibly access private documents if it wanted to, etc.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#693

Post by traderj0e » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

andersonpico wrote: post #11

this is a massive violation of trust > The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).

These extensions sound like straight up malware anyway

  LinkedIn scans for Anti-woke (“The anti-wokeness extension. Shows warnings about woke companies”), Anti-Zionist Tag (“Adds a tag to the LinkedIn profiles of Anti-Zionists”), Vote With Your Money (“showing political contributions from executives and employees”), No more Musk (“Hides digital noise related to Elon Musk,” 19 users), Political Circus (“Politician to Clown AI Filter,” 7 users), LinkedIn Political Content Blocker, and NoPolitiLinked.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#694

Post by hn_acc1 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #592

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.

> The social contract was "your ads aren't annoying or invasive Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too. You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!

I remember a time before ads. I remember the first time I got "spam" email - email not directly addressed to me that ended up in my inbox. I was very confused for some time about why this email was sent to me.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#695

Post by hn_acc1 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #483

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the internet you pay to access and which was around before the ads were even on it? That internet? I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief. Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet: a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs b) a few years later a new guy called commercial busin…

Ya, back when 'we' were fucking around on BBS's there was the equivalent of 10 people online at the time. Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.

Honestly, I still prefer webboards, the closest thing to a BBS, for specific topics like specific car brands/models. WAY better signal-to-noise ratio. Alas, for my car model, all the recent stuff has moved to Fbook. FML.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#696

Post by hn_acc1 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #540

kibwen wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is moving the goalposts. The commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes. If all you mean to say is that the internet is currently commercialized, yes, that is obviously true, in much the same way that a disgusting ball of decomposing fungus may have once been an…

> commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.

Compuserve was NOT the internet. Compuserve / Prodigy / GEnie were early versions of Facebook. They also inter-operated (email) for some period of time. IIRC.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#697

Post by traderj0e » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

calgarymicro wrote: post #364

cbeach wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, they mean Anti-Zionist Tag[0], an extension that is live on the Chrome Web Store and identifies anti -Zionists for the benefit of Zionists. [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anti-zionist-tag/ek...

Guess an anti-Zionist could use this too, to know who's cool. Except in reality this extension probably just scrapes data and mines bitcoin

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#698

Post by bookofjoe » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #515

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…

Every browser should have ad blocking technology included and enabled by default. I do not understand why Apple in particular has not pushed this with Safari, as they like to portray that they care about privacy. I get why Chrome doesn't, and that's why you should not use it. But Netscape? Edge? What is stopping them? Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience. Users who have never tried or don'…

>Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience.

That is your experience. Mine is the opposite.

>Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.

Perhaps.

"I would prefer not to." — Bartleby, The Scrivener

https://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#699

Post by order-matters » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #611

order-matters wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also done similar research because I wanted to build something to handle microtransactions on a personal website that could scale if adopted to be usable by everyone if they wanted. I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire n…

It would need to be mostly centralized, but keeping track of history would not be hard. A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for fi…

fair enough on tracking history in the centralized model. I had suspicions there would be hidden costs that might make it too expensive. i dont think the data storage would be as much of a problem as the cost to write it to storage.

I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.

the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#700

Post by gib444 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

LinkedinHelp wrote: post #677

The claims made on the website linked here are plain wrong. The person behind them is subject to an account restriction for scraping and other violations of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service. To protect the privacy of our members, their data, and to ensure site stability, we do look for extensions that scrape data without members’ consent or otherwise violate LinkedIn’s Terms of Service. Here’s why: some extensions have st…

Micrôsoft does indeed have a lofty and sturdy moral high ground from which to denounce scrapers and breaches of intellectual property rights and website TOS violations, having never invested in OpenAI.