LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer

https://lemmy.ca/post/62734071

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer - Lemmy.ca

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1024319 [https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1024319] > Comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613981]

My question is how. Am I too naive to believe that the browser would stop a webpage from crawling your computer?
And I would be very surprised if their crawler manages to somehow work on Linux…

It looks like the attack only works on Chrome (or Chrome based browsers).

They have 2 methods for figuring out which extensions are used: asking the browser for files related to each of the 6000+ extensions they scan for, and checking the DOM for injected content

But that doesn’t mean that Firefox couldn’t be targeted in the future.

A good way to protect yourself is to use uBlock Origin or something similar, which will block the collected data from getting sent to LinkedIn

Extensions? It just said software above.

Is it actually scanning for installed software on the system or just chrome extensions?

Yeah it’s a bit dishonest

Instead of

hidden code searches their computer for installed software

I would say

hidden code searches their browser for installed extensions