LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions • Hacker News Board

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#831

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 8:48 AM UTC

brokencode wrote: post #466

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…

I mean yeah, you pay for the internet. But many sites are free to use only due to ads. Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue. I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads. But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.

If their business depends on psychologically manipulating me into acting against my own best interests then I hope they go out of business.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#832

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #292

toomuchtodo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay f…

Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders, who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay.

Freeloaders like all the ad-supported platforms that rely on free "content" created by the users?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#833

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #496

IAmBroom wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whale based economy Please explain this term. Google was not useful.

Whales are the tiny percentage of users who spend large amounts of actual money on bullshit non-products offered by mobile apps and online platforms. AKA suckers.

Or addicts and people with other mental issues that make them easy to prey upon.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#834

Post by account42 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

Rychard wrote: post #303

Xirdus wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.

I'm not saying that Firefox on Android has significant market share; rather that Android has significant market share, and those users could be served by switching to Firefox solely for the purpose of using an adblocker. If all Android users did this, something would change.

> something would change

Google would make it harder to install Firefox? Like they are already doing with anything not on their approved list?

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#835

Post by jcgrillo » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

worik wrote: post #813

jcgrillo wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, what I meant was there's no way ICs will change any of this. Using this or that extension, or choosing not to use some service won't really change anything either. The popular appetite just isn't there. Personally I use a variety of adblockers and haven't had a linkedin or anything for many years, but I fully accept that's an extremist position and most consumers will not behave that way. The only way these comp…

> The popular appetite just isn't there. Cory Doctorow, if he is to believed, states 50% of web users use ad blockers. So maybe?

That's really interesting, I had no idea it was so prevalent.

Re: LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions

#836

Post by gzread » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

MidnightRider39 wrote: post #788

gzread wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla backed down due to the backlash. It still means Mozilla is untrustworthy.

This implies they had some sinister plan to claim all your data as theirs or something which is ridiculous - they didn’t back down from anything but changed the wording of the legal text to make it easier to parse for non-lawyers.

There is no other interpretation of changing "we respect your privacy and do not sell your data" to "we respect your privacy".

Mozilla even tried to claim the old wording was bad because some governments erroneously define "sell" as "to exchange something for valuable consideration, such as money".