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LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions (github.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/privacy@programming.dev

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[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dude it asks your browser, not the chrome store.

[–] RonSijm@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago

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