This is re-posted article from the author's Substack that does a pretty bad job of explaining the situation. The second link in the article is supposed to take you to a "GitHub repository tracking the extension list" but it goes to a GitHub page for a plugin that hasn't been updated in 9 years.

It has a lot of hallmarks of LLM writings ("It's not this, it's that" and feeling like a lot of empty words rehydrated from an outline) while missing the real updates in the story like the German affidavit filed by a LinkedIn engineer who worked on these tools.

A key piece of information that this article omits is that the list of extensions being scanned for doesn't include anything you'd recognize or anything you'd even think to install. It's full of data extraction tools, scrapers, AI spam and recruiting tools (remember all those automated spammy LinkedIn messages you got?), and plugins masquerading as simple things that have been pulled from the extension store for violations.

A lot of articles have been trying hard to distract from this fact by highlighting that the list of extension includes things like a plugin designed to simplify web pages for neurodivergent users or an "anti-Zionist political tagger" to imply that they're trying to do fingerprinting based on those attributes, but they neglect to mention that those plugins were pulled from the extension store most likely because they were data exfiltrators dressed up as simple plugins to get people to install them.

An updated list is available here: https://browsergate.eu/extensions/

But read that site carefully and actually try to click the links. In this section they're trying to direct your attention away from all of the AI spam and data extraction tools with this section:

> The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools. It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”), whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users (simplify).

But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store. Extensions like that are often bait to get people to install scrapers that will use your computer and LinkedIn login to extract data and send it back to their servers.

So regardless of where you stand on probing for the presence of these scammy extensions, you should at least understand the facts rather than the story that companies like this are trying to sell you to drive traffic to their product.

I suggest cutting through the ragebait journalism and reading more directly from a recent source, like this affidavit filed in Germany by a LinkedIn engineer familiar with the project: https://browsergate.eu/downloads/Lakam-affidavit-redacted.pd...

> But click the links. They've all been pulled from the store.

I did that with the first five extensions in the list; only one was removed from the store. So you should qualify this statement.

Maybe they are all scammy extensions, and maybe this is a weird LLM-driven astroturfing campaign, but let's try to at least root our arguments in a shared reality.