Everyone in this working world knows LinkedIn, which is one of the biggest online networking platforms where people can find jobs, build their network, build their own business, and much more. If you are a working person, you know the weightage of your own LinkedIn profile, as it is the same for founders or any other business person.
Having an account on this platform is really good and it will do so many good things for you — like you will get a good job, you get your company funded by people, or you meet your co-founders. This is the one way you know about this platform, but on the other hand, LinkedIn is doing some serious things with our data.
Browsergate.eu, a research organization, found that LinkedIn is harvesting our data with some hidden scripts on the backend without the knowledge of the users, and they have been doing this for many years without any concern, as this was a serious privacy breach for the users. What they exactly do is recruiters or employees sometimes use third-party extensions to find out information so they can reach out to employers or employees for an opportunity, but LinkedIn found this opportunity to harvest data from the users and they are doing it in the name of preventing the extensions from scraping the data.
There are more than 6,000 extensions that LinkedIn identifies and uses for the scraping. The sensitive data includes users’ device information and some sensitive personal information as well. They have also claimed they were sharing the information with other third-party agencies.
But LinkedIn has denied the allegations and they were saying they are only doing it to stop the scraping that was happening on their website to protect the users. Despite their denial, the allegations are real.
As the script was mainly focused on Chromium browsers, you can switch to Firefox or Safari if you are using a Mac. But if you feel you need to use Chrome or other browsers, then keep a separate profile without any extensions installed, or you can use Brave browser with fingerprint protection enabled.
Sources included below:
LinkedIn caught spying on users’ browsers: sensitive data harvested
LinkedIn secretly scans for 6,000+ Chrome extensions, collects data
