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.
Am I correct in reading this as a problem only for Chrome users? If it’s doing hard coded searches of IDs in the chrome extension store, it seems like it is easily defeated by simply using another browser.
Most browsers now are Chromium based, which can use the same extensions (and often do by default) as are in the chrome web store. But, yes, something webkit based or a firefox derivative should avoid that portion of the awful things happening here.
But the fact that you basically can’t do anything on linkedin without logging into an account, and they really push for your account to have all of your real life information in it, and they have 3 distinct fingerprinting and tracking systems running to monitor anything your account does on the website (and allows your boss to see)… It’s not great.