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mongrelion 4 hours ago

Curious question: why would they check for installed extensions on one's browser?

CobrastanJorji 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fingerprinting. There are a few reasons you'd do it:

1. Bot prevention. If the bots don't know that you're doing this, you might have a reliable bot detector for a while. The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all, or even better specific exact combination they always use. Noticing bots means you can block them from scraping your site or spamming your users. If you wanna be very fancy, you could provide fake data or quietly ignore the stuff they create on the site.

2. Spamming/misuse evasion. Imagine an extension called "Send Messages to everybody with a given job role at this company." LinkedIn would prefer not to allow that, probably because they'd want to sell that feature.

3. User tracking.

xz18r 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wrote some automation scripts that are not triggered via browser extensions (e.g., open all my sales colleagues’ profiles and like their 4 most recent unliked posts to boost their SSI[1], which is probably the most ‘innocent’ of my use-cases). It has random sleep intervals. I’ve done this for years and never faced a ban hammer.

Wonder if with things like Moltbot taking the scene, a form of “undetectable LinkedIn automation” will start to manifest. At some point they won’t be able to distinguish between a chronically online seller adding 100 people per day with personalized messages, or an AI doing it with the same mannerisms.

[1] https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling...

jppope 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

most automations for sales and marketing use browser extensions... linkedIn wants you using their tools not 3rd party

Nextgrid 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Their own tools suck, that’s the issue.

staticshock 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For a social network, more information about their users = better ad targeting. It likely gets plumbed into models to inform user profiles.

Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Look at the actual list. It's primarily questionable AI tools, scrapers, lead generation tools, and other plugins in that vein.

I would guess this is for rate limiting and abuse detection.

HPsquared 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An attempt at fingerprinting, I suppose?

4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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