digitalWestie3d ago

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer

https://browsergate.eu/

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer

Microsoft is running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history. Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm. The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it. Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title, it is not searching anonymous visitors. It is searching identified people at identified companies. Millions of companies. Every day. All over the world.

BrowserGate
Show threadhaswell3d ago

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 to find in modern browser fingerprinting code. I’m not deeply familiar with what APIs are available for detecting extensions, but the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch) vs. something inherently sinister (e.g. “they’re checking to see if you’re a Muslim”).

I’m certainly not endorsing it, do think it’s pretty problematic, and I’m glad it’s getting some visibility. But I do take some issue with the alarmist framing of what’s going on.

I’ve come to mostly expect this behavior from most websites that run advertising code and this is why I run ad blockers.

Show threadlastofthemojito3d ago

> 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 would take at least a couple of minutes of my time, I'll just go ahead and continue to suffer with invasive ads and make sure $GOOG keeps going up".

Show threadsurajrmal3d ago
Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed onto tracking for the slim improvement it provides.
Show threadarray_key_first3d ago

It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield.

I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month.

Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.

Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.

Show threadabustamam

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. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

Apr 2 at 3:19pmWeb
Show threaddotancohen3d ago

> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking

How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?

Show threadCamperBob23d ago

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?

Show threadTerretta3d ago

Texture was incredible.

Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.

Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...

Show threadsaghm3d ago

> 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.

The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.

Show threadTerretta3d ago

content creator is new speak

people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to

that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked

at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person

publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well

having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round