LinkedIn Was Snooping Through Your Computer. Literally.

You open LinkedIn to check out an interesting job posting or scroll through your feed, right? Normal stuff. What's *not* normal is what was happening under the hood. Researchers at Fairlinked discovered that every time you visit LinkedIn, a hidden piece of code scans your browser for installed extensions and software — and sends all of it to LinkedIn's servers and third-party companies. No asking. No warning. Zero mention in the privacy policy. Oh, and the name they gave this scandal? **BrowserGate**. **But wait, it gets better:** The scan can identify extensions that reveal your religion, political orientation, neurodivergence — and my personal favorite for sheer irony — **whether you're secretly job hunting on LinkedIn while still employed**. On the very same platform where your boss can see your profile. On top of that, LinkedIn used this data to map which competitor tools (like Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo) users had installed — essentially stealing the customer lists of hundreds of software companies without anyone's knowledge. **And the cherry on top:** when the European Union required LinkedIn to open its platform to third-party tools (via the Digital Markets Act), they responded with two tiny APIs that together handle **0.07 calls per second**. Meanwhile, their internal API — called Voyager — runs at **163,000 calls per second**. The word "Voyager" doesn't appear a single time in the 249-page compliance report submitted to the European Commission. Legal proceedings have already been filed. You can follow everything at [browsergate.eu](https://browsergate.eu). The takeaway? It's always worth opening DevTools every now and then to see what that popular website is actually sending out. Sometimes the biggest tracker isn't the ad cookie — it's the platform where you spend hours every day. *Stay curious. Stay paranoid (just a little).*