Microsoft is running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history. 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 to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm. The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it. Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title, it is not searching anonymous visitors. It is searching identified people at identified companies. Millions of companies. Every day. All over the world.

Microsoft is running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history. 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 to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613981

  • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    That might have been a sensible argument 20 years ago. Mozilla has spent the last 5 or so slowly stripping most of that out for “anti-fingerprinting” without breaking website layout.

    • TootGuitar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I have been doing web development pretty much since the web was created.

      “Sniffing your browser extensions is normal to be able to render the page correctly” is not and was never a sensible argument. 20 years ago, neither Chrome nor the iPhone existed yet. Most people browsed the web on computers, and “works best in Internet Explorer” was widespread. Web developers were lazy and many of them literally only tested their sites in IE on Windows. Browser extensions themselves were much more of a niche thing since IE didn’t support them.

      • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I will have to yield to your experience then. I mainly thought of it as a naive type of sensible argument, given people were not all that concerned about tracking and particularly browser fingerprinting. I guess back then, the main thing was web developers who used flash needed to check for it. But those people were anti-open web back then and deserved to be ignored by the browser makers.

        I am guessing you were strongly in the open web camp back then. I am glad we sort of won that particular battle, even if we lost so many others.

        • TootGuitar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          Yeah, you’re right on that you needed to check for Flash if your site used it. But at the risk of sounding overly pedantic: Flash wasn’t a browser extension either; it was a plugin, which though named similarly were completely different implementation-wise. Browser plugins are not really supported anymore in 2026, due to them having essentially unrestricted access to the host machine.