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.

> 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".