Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cant believe that people still have the attitude that the trillions of dollars being invested in all this technology and tracking is just to give them a more relevant ad . Do people really not remember scandals like Cambridge Analytica, and realise that these ads combined with social media feeds can be used to literally control and manipulate peoples decisions and behavoir? Theres a reason Facebook and Youtube just…
is the manipulation of decisions and behavior not just a way of saying sales and marketing? I agree that it def can be used for bad things, but so can most tools/systems
LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
821–830 of 836 posts
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#822Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent post said: > if they do a better job at showing me an ad that might be relevant to me, how is that disgusting? To me that signalled that the author of the comment doesnt really care what is gonig on behind the scenes if the result is a better and more relevant ad. I see this attitude often from people who dont seem to understand the severity and seriousness of online tracking which leads to psychological p…
I agree that it could come off as gross negligence to not care about what happens with your data. My point is that LinkedIn already has enough information (We've willingly given them!) to manipulate outcomes and if they're doing something nefarious, then it's already too late. Whereas Cambridge Analytica involved bad actors (not Facebook) duping customers and re-selling their data. I don't think those elements are ne…
I think I was just getting on my high horse at the fact that the whole internet ad machine is doing this terrible thing for society and nobody really seems to care that much.
This thread was more about Linkdin specifically scraping data instead of maniuplative ads, so apologies for derailing.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This would be in the same vein as Google Chrome replacing ManifestV2 with ManifestV3, ostensibly for performance- and security-related purposes, when it just so happens that ManifestV3 limits the ability to block ads in Chrome… the major source of revenue for Google. uBlock Origin Lite (compatible w/ ManifestV3) works quite well for me, I do not see any ads wherever I browse.
The mv3 problem was never about "does it work now". It was about "can it keep up". Ad blocking is a cat and mouse game, and the mouse is kneecapped now. You're being slow boiled.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a wolf who eats beef, and the "beef" doesn't go away if another wolf eats them.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cu…
The tracking network is NOT our competitor, nor is it a competitor to any of our competitors. It is a third party outside of our market. We buy fraud signals from them, not the data.
We do not get to learn anything about any other ecommerce from them. They collect info from all ecommerce that buys from them, and any partnerships they have, and they sell us derived signals that we can use to deny transactions that are most likely fraudulent.
That's why they get the cooperation of retailers. They save retailers lots of money, they enable ecommerce to exist basically at all, there's no downside but their price, and they charge big bucks.
There's very little actual "Data brokering" going on. Almost all tracking is done as a company collecting data as an asset, and selling derivations of that data. Why would a tracking company sell the data itself? That's their core IP.
What's funny is that all the retailers could replace that expensive contract with a very very cheap alliance of all interested retailers where you pay some portion of a collective AWS bill and submit your signals and everyone benefits collectively, but US business loves to buy services rather than solve problems efficiently.
Some people point at your raw data not being openly available for some sort of "It's not that bad" conclusion which is absurd. You can't buy the raw data but a third party will happily sell whatever "Against the current regime bit" the right buyer wants. Think of a way the raw data can be used against you and then add to that situation a layer of indirection that gives everyone involved plausible deniability.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#826Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 cu…
That data is very valuable. It's their entire business. The tracking network is NOT our competitor, nor is it a competitor to any of our competitors. It is a third party outside of our market. We buy fraud signals from them, not the data. We do not get to learn anything about any other ecommerce from them. They collect info from all ecommerce that buys from them, and any partnerships they have, and they sell us deriv…
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#827Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#828The 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…
Working around deliberate API designs that are designed to make it harder to get a list of all installed extensions is inherently sinister. It's very clearly malicious. We absolutely should not accept that kind of behavior from anyone and definitely not from the corporations large enough that we can't realistically avoid depending upon them.
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is between the data you give out voluntarily and what is taken from you without consent
If you voluntarily visit my website and my web server sends a response to your IP address, have I “taken” your IP address, or did you give it to me “voluntarily”? What if I log your IP address?
Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
#830Earlier 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…
This is ignoring things like newspapers that were made obsolete by the internet. At some point someone does need to actually pay for the content we see online. That is if we want that content to actually be good.