277
LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
(browsergate.eu)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
277 points (100.0% liked)
World News
55819 readers
1462 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This is straight up misinformation. First off, it's perfectly legal.
LinkedIn does browser fingerprinting. It's the same thing Google and Meta do. It's how Google Ads is shifting to a post-adblocker revenue stream.
Browser fingerprints show fonts used, audio codecs, WebGL render data, processor, operating system - enough that if you add up several factors together, it makes a statistically unique fingerprint. it does NOT scan applications on your computer. It can't. It DOES scan which browser extensions you have running (if they affect page loading).
If you check your email and then close that and go to Google in an incognito window and search for porn - Google will fucking know what you're looking at. Gmail and all Google apps all fingerprint, and then you'll notice how Google ads trackers are on most sites online? Yep. That's how they track you.
Use a VPN? Use an ad blocker? Great - Google doesn't care. Google can track your fingerprint.
See your own fingerprint - check how it know it's you visit after visit.
https://fingerprint.com/
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
https://amiunique.org/
There is literally a section called Why it's illegal.
Well that was very interesting. I wasn't planning to cover my tracks, but apparently I am.
They also scan for thousands of extensions. The only reason it doesn't do this on Firefox is that Firefox randomises the uuid of extensions every time. Chrome doesn't.
Oh so that's what that annoying feature is about. I'm sorry I ever thought it was annoying uuid fetishism. I was wrong
technically browser extensions are considered applications under EU's GDPR
as per their report:
While browser extensions are considered apps under the GDPR, the headline is intentionally misleading. LinkedIn isn't "Illegally Searching your Computer." It's asking the browser for all the info it's maximally able to give up. We do need to define browser extensions in a way that doesn't use fear as clickbait to make it sound like LinkedIn has greater access to a device than it really has.
And thanks for the correction on AED, I had seen another analysis a couple weeks back and I didn't recall correctly what was being collected.
it's misleading to say its searching your computer tho...? this invokes the thought of LinkedIn getting to rifle through your files like it has access to ~/Documents/ or smth.
but yeah tracking you over the internet is similarly bad
Wait, your browser extensions aren't on your computer?
It's misleading because saying "search the computer" implies a breadth of scan that isn't present. That's like saying a website "searches the computer" to grab cookies generated by that site; technically true but worded to be misleading.
To be clear this is bad, but it's important to be clear when explaining why it is bad to avoid creating resentment when the person you are explaining it to looks deeper into it themself and finds that it's not as bad as your explanation was implying.
I believe the point they’re trying to make is that they have access to APIs which describe particular software on your PC. You can argue based on the fact that, yes, the software is persisted on your filesystem. However, the API they access brokers [meta]data about the software. It’s not a filesystem API. If I add arbitrary files to an extension directory under my browsers path for extension persistence, they probably cannot see those arbitrary files unless the extension is built to allow it.
There is a big difference between having direct and broad read access to the filesystem, versus the much smaller volume of data they can infer about your filesystem using APIs for browser extension data.
There isn't an API for browser extension data. They are searching for the existence of thousands of specific addresses to perform the search.
Fonts, codecs, hardware, OS, extensions are all parts of a computer that never ever need to be transmitted to a website for it to function. Any information about them should be sandboxed, and if the website wants to display differently based on them, it can send static data or code in and get nothing back out.
It depends on the website, but LinkedIn certainty doesn't need full fingerprint data to operate correctly. Most privacy-respecting browsers either mask or spoof the data already.
I'm pretty sure for fonts they can tell because they have different widths, which affects page layout, which can be measured.
There's a lot of stuff like that.
Best would be make it illegal and give the law teeth. Solving it technically will always be an arms race.
Yeah, they can very easily get all of that right now. But functionally there's no good reason for any browser to let them. Page layout should be a one-way operation that doesn't allow information back through.
You'd have to kill a lot of JavaScript and CSS for that to work, and then a lot of legitimate function goes away.
Done much web development work?
You don't have to kill much functionality at all. Scripts that need to access that data should simply live in a sandbox with no network access. They can still do full computational layout.
I have done exclusively web development work.
So you're going to make it illegal to call
getBoundingClientRectand then pass that information tofetchthrough any mechanism?Essentially yes. Basically, think of two JS sandboxes that can manipulate the same DOM. One can make requests, but cannot retrieve local layout data. The other can get layout data, but not make requests. Both can set layout data.
Web developers can use the former 99% of the time, and the latter for more precise work.
Surely functionality affecting display can be standardized to the point of making them useless for fingerprints? I don’t really care what font my browser uses, as long as I don’t notice it. Similarly, other details should either be randomized, mocked, jittered, or outright blocked. Fingerprinting only works because they’re operating in a rather non-adversarial space. The weakness with their current approach is the huge set of variables, which I’m sure we can leverage to reduce the algorithms determinism.
We can either all appear the same, or appear completely unique every time. Either approach should work.
I don't know a lot about how fingerprinting works, but some of what i've read is pretty insidious. Some things could probably be obfuscated, but some of what the trackers use has legitimate purposes as well. Your application may serve different content based on the screen size, or fall back to an older library if such-and-such API isn't supported.
Personally I'd rather make targeting advertising and tracking illegal, and gut the whole thing to avoid the arms race.
I think the argument is that since some of the extensions that are probed can be political in nature, which can reveal political identity, which is potentially unlawful in the EU. However, it really needs to be up to a judge to make a decision on that.
In general what they're doing is legal, and the BrowserGate people are using niggling little details, a handful of extensions out of the 6000 probed, to justify this argument. I couldn't say, especially as someone from outside the EU, whether this is actually illegal or not, but it's definitely in a nebulous area at the moment.
Though I agree it's sensationalized in terms of claiming it's "searching your computer" and doing "corporate espionage."
Yeah but still sick of this shit
Looks good!
I have NoScript for JS tracking, but what do you use for fingerprint randomisation?
I use CanvasBlocker.
I'm using canvas blocker and I'm still getting "Your browser has a unique fingerprint"
What am I missing?
I'm not sure, but I believe PumaStoleMyBluff's reply may describe the issue.
Your link just opens this whole thread for me.
Is there something wrong on my end (using Summit app) or is your link broken?
Sorry, I'm pretty new to the Fediverse, so I probably did it wrong. Hoping someone will correct me, but in the mean time I'll quote the person whose comment I meant to link to:
I made no effort to do that, im using the duckduckgo browser on my phone.
Interesting, I also have the DDG browser but the test shows a unique fingerprint result. I don't think that I have tinkered with any settings and I haven't installed addons.
Some of the test sites don't differentiate between random and unique. They may see a randomized fingerprint as a plausible unique user, but it may be different the next time you visit. Other sites may detect that your browser has taken steps to randomize your fingerprint, and use that as an identifying piece of information on its own (power user vs average joe)
Correction- the first test was the browser inside the lemmy voyager app, not sure what its based on. This one is out of the DDG app;
the browser in voyager is probably your default browser over customtabs