LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions

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he/him

github.com/mdp/linkedin-extension-fingerprinting

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If I use Firefox, am I immune to this kind of privacy invasion?

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Actually, this was already asked in a cross post: https://lemmy.zip/comment/24461385

Sorry

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Why the hell is this even possible? Why should a web page have access to the extensions you run?

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They couldn’t round it up to 3000? They got shy or what?

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Uhm, doesn’t really sound like this could be true. Maybe I’m missing something?

You’d see 2953 get requests in your network tab, right?

And the article says:

LinkedIn silently probes for 2,953 Chrome extensions on every page load.

Surely it would be drastically noticeable if for every page load they do 3k get requests to the chrome store

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Dude it asks your browser, not the chrome store.

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Yea, well that was my first though, but then I though - why would chrome even allow any website to just arbitrary check which extensions you have installed.

So I checked the scripts and at this line the script is showing

async function fetchExtensionInfo(extensionId) {
  return new Promise((resolve) => {
    const url = `https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/$%7BextensionId%7D`;

So I thought maybe they were calling the chromewebstore foreach plugin, and if you have an extension already installed, you get a different response than when you don’t - or something.

But I suppose I’m wrong and for some reason a site can just ask the browser internally which plugins are installed

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.zip

Does this work on firefox? Does ublock origin block this?

Is this why linkedin eats so damn much ram. It eays 300 mb for a single tab. I opened 3 linkedin tabs and it lagged my entire computer.

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OP

As far as I can see Firefox is not affected by this as they are using random UUIDs for extensions on each startup and this tracks Chrome package IDs that are static.

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Does the script attempt to run though? If linkedin runs this and other scripts it would explain why the site is so bloated.

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OP

Not sure, sorry.

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