alt Hacker NewsLinkedIn is illegally searching your computer
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A few years ago, intentionally fingerprinting or tracking your users without disclosure was spyware and unethical. Alas, here we are.
Anyway, what they're calling "spectroscopy", is a combination of extension probing and doing residue detection (looking for what extensions might leave behind in the DOM).
An ad blocker is not necessarily equipped to help since the script is embedded with the application code. Since they're targetting Chrome, switching browsers will help with the probing but not the detection part and you'll still be fingerprinted.
The only way forward is for browser vendors to offer a real privacy or incognito mode where sites are sandboxed by default. When the default profile is identical across millions of users there won't be anything unique to fingerprint.
I don't have a linkedin acct. So imagine my shock when I "googled" myself and found a linkedin profile connecting my name to a company I presently have a consulting arrangement with (1099 not W2). I went ballistic and fired off an email to the consulting firm to take down the profile immediately or face legal action (a bluff). Couple days later, the company forwarded an email they received from linkedin confirming the profile had been taken down.
So this is just a heads up that even if you don't have a linkedin account, they will create one on your behalf so might better check (assuming you neither have nor want one).
this is a massive violation of trust
> The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).
There is no reason to trust any big tech company. Folks should be using containers in their browser if they care about privacy. I previously published a LinkedIn container extension for FireFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkedin-cont... although as many know you can achieve the same results with Firefox containers without a specific extension like mine if you configure it manually.
I will work on an improvement to that extension so that it can block these scans if they attempt them in firefox.
>the fact that it scans for specific extensions sounds more like a product of an API limitation (i.e. no available getAllExtensions() or somesuch)
Why should a website be able to scan for extensions at all?
Or if there's a legitimate need (like linkedin.com wants to see if you installed the linkedin extension), leave it up to the extension to decide if it wants to reveal itself. The extension can register a list of URL patterns it will reveal itself to. So the linkedin extension might reveal itself only to *.linkedin.com, a language translation extension might reveal itself to everyone, and an adblocker extension might not choose to reveal itself to anyone.
All I'm seeing is that Chrome apparently is failing to properly sandbox websites against extension fingerprinting.
Sure, this can be solved at the legal layer, but in this case, there seems to be a much simpler and more effective technical solution, so why not pursue that instead?
Fwiw... I now run personal and professional browser profiles from two different jails / cgroups. It's a pain in the arse to set up, and I have to verify my config still works after every update, but I get a good feeling knowing my personal chocolate is not mixing in with my professional peanut butter.
I set up the cgroups hack so I could route traffic from a dev profile into a VPS vpn, and may not be that useful for everyone.
But I think this is a reminder that you may want to have at least two profiles: one public and the other private. Do you really want Microsoft to know you installed the "Otaku Neko StarBlazers Tru-Fen Extendomatic" package to change every picture of a current political figure to an image from the cast of Space Battleship Yamato?
the part about scanning for 509 job search extensions is especially nasty. imagine getting flagged to your employer because linkedin detected you had a job board extension installed.
Separate question, why isn't this kind of stuff something the browser restricts access to or puts behind an approval gate to the end user?
What's an optimistic future for Web fingerprinting? Currently, a website's ability to fingerprint the browser, the device, and the user is absolutely ridiculous.
Here's a quick look at only the static things a website can fingerprint https://www.browserscan.net/.
AFAIK it can be fined with up to 4% of revenue in the EU.
How much is that currently? $600M?
why would the browser ever expose extensions api to a web page. does firefox does this as well?
https://browsergate.eu/extensions/
It seems to not scan for Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin, two extensions I rely on. That's...surprising.
The “how it works” page suggests it only works on chrome based browsers. Anyone able to determine if firefox or safari are affected too?
Read this:
> 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 thought, "no way in hell this gets by Safari."
And then, under "The Attack: How it Works":
> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser
Shocker. If you use a Chromium-based browser, you should expect to be trading away your privacy, IME.
I remember the LinkedIn app that got all your contacts from your phone and tried to add them to your network. I had random people from internet-deals (local craigslist) that where popping up. So strange that this was allowed.
Wish they'd add a little more to what end-users can do about it like switch to a non chrome-based browser.
Oh boy, they stand to lose dozens of users over this! DOZENS!
I wonder how much of this is also used for audience segmentation for their advertisements? Linkedin ads are some of the most expensive out of any social media platform, but they also tend to have the highest conversion since you can get pretty niche with your targeting.
It will sound like finessing on details, but details are important in these kind of claims, and this seems incorrect
> Microsoft has 33,000 employees and a $15 billion legal budget
Microsoft has more than 220k employees (it's hard to follow with all the layoffs), and the G&A in which bankrolls legal expenses (but not only - it also contains basically every employee who's not engineering or sales) was only 7B in 2025 - so legal budget is much lower than that.
Enumerated a full list.
https://git.gay/SiteRelEnby/browsergate-list
https://git.gay/SiteRelEnby/browsergate-list/src/branch/main...
I want to know what power I have as just some guy to do anything about this? (even if just for myself)
I ask because it seems like every job I apply to asks for a linkedin profile, and I've heard floating around that if it's not filled in enough most employers assume you're a bot. Heck, one of the forms from the "who's hiring" thread yesterday straight up said if you have < 100 connections they'd throw out your application. So, in order to get my foot in the door, I need to hand over vast and intricate data about my personal life to a third party?
This website was difficult to follow but I found that this page https://browsergate.eu/extensions/ was the most helpful to understand what they were talking about
Essentially, they are labelling you, like most do, but against some interesting profiles given the kinds of extensions they are scanning for
seems like clickbaiting, browser can't 'scan' your computer...
The most obvious reason for this is browser fingerprinting, right? So your visits to other websites can be linked to your Linkedin identity? Or no?
I'm certain that if LinkedIn were confronted, that they could produce a response that says they are covered by the TOS you had to agree to in order to use the site. I don't have time to spend scanning legalease. Or make use of LinkedIn. If my system is being scanned, they'll see that I'm using a legitimate licensed copy of Windows 7 on a MODERN computer. If anything is at fault, it includes web browsers that Identify themselves to web sites.
How is it even possible that we've reached a point where "yes, this is obvious and pretty unsurprising" is the default response to spying on an industrial scale.
> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome[actually Chromium]-based browser
There's a reason I continue to use Firefox (with uBlock Origin) and will never switch.
Also, when I got laid off from a previous job, I made a LinkedIn profile to help find a new job. Once I found a new job, I haven't logged into LinkedIn since - that was almost 2 years ago.
I don't like any of this, but I'm not totally clear how this is substantially different from other fingerprinting technologies which I assume are used by every large tech company. Could anyone elaborate? The post isn't very clear why this is different from other data surveillance.
LinkedIn also violates SPAM regulations on a regular basis. Despite of me having disabled all emails from this service I consistently receive promotional emails. LinkedIn defines a new "type of promotional email" for which it assumes it has implicit consent to send unsolicited emails and proceeds to do so. It then has a fake compliance apparatus by allowing the victim to once again "unsubscribe" from the newly created email subscription which they never consented to on the first place. I really hope there is a class action and these scumbags get fined.
Interesting. I didn't know a extension’s web-accessible resource (e.g. chrome-extension://<id>/...) could be abused to learn about the user's installed extensions by checking whether it resolves or not.
Is there a way to disable the ability for websites to scan for extensions in Chrome?
That's on brand. I remember their phone app asking for contacts permission and just taking them all and uploading them to their server.
"searching your computer" -> using standard web fingerprinting techniques. They don't actually get to read your home directory, and the authors should be honest about this!
Yep, LinkedIn is cancer.
2020 - LinkedIn Sued For Spying on Clipboard Data After iOS 14 Exposes Its App:
https://wccftech.com/linkedin-sued-for-spying-on-clipboard-d...
2013 - LinkedIn MITM attacks your iPhone to read your mail:
https://www.troyhunt.com/disassembling-privacy-implications-...
2012/2016 - Data breach of 164.6 million accounts:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/breach/LinkedIn
According to haveibeenpwned.com, my email & password were leaked in both the 'May 2012' and 'April 2021' LinkedIn incidents.
This title should be changed as no court found this is illegal, and this is pretty standard, if extensive, browser fingerprinting, however disagreeable it is
Go check out QueryAllPackages permission on Android and see which of your apps can scan and know about all the other apps on your Phone. Thanks Google!
I alway use LinkedIn and Meta websites in a different browser altogether.
I hope browsers in the future will need to ask for permission before doing any of that.
They only mention this being a potential violation of the DMA. How about north american countries? US and Canada?
I run MalwareBytes on all my browsers and as my computer protection system.
LinkedIn is getting nothing.
LinkedIn has been overtly evil for decades, and their power users are the most insufferable sort of middle management yuppy scum. I know job searching can be hard, but I don't go near LinkedIn with a ten foot pole.
The real story is what's going on behind the scenes. The charges are relatively flimsy (for the reason I mentioned in my other comment). But here's the cool thing: the site is basically taken from Microsoft's playbook. For years, they pretty transparently bankrolled shadowy, single-issue "grassroots advocacy" groups that went after their competitors under flimsy pretenses. These organizations attacked others but somehow never had an opinion about stuff like Windows Copilot.
This feels very similar, except now it's taking a swing at Microsoft. It's apparently paid for by some mysterious "trade association and advocacy group for commercial LinkedIn users" that runs out of a private PO box in a small German town - uh huh. I'm not going to feel bad for Microsoft, but I would love to read some investigative reporting down the line.
Not mine. And why do we say LinkedIn, it is just Microsoft, just like Github is Microsoft and a whole raft of other companies are just Microsoft in a trenchcoat.
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.