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I can think of tons of non-malicious reasons. 1. Support requests because site is broken, but it turns out you are using an extension that breaks the site. 2.

I can think of tons of non-malicious reasons. 1. Support requests because site is broken, but it turns out you are using an extension that breaks the site. 2. Extensions are exfiltrating data to the extension owners, against LinkedIn's TOS, and they are trying to protect their users, or rather, they don't want competition :) OK, that was two. They aren't blinding probing for any and all extensions, only a specific set, which shows restraint and implies to me they are having a sort of arms race with extensions that scrape contact info.

jguffey 7y ago
There are a lot of extensions built for networking professionals (recruiters, marketers, sales people) that automate browser behavior on LinkedIn in an attempt to drum up attention. For example: automatically viewing profiles of candidates, so that the candidate sees the recruiter/sales person on their "who's viewed my profile" page. A cursory google-search for something like "linkedin browser plugin" yields tons of these types of products.
kibwen 7y ago
> They aren't blinding probing for any and all extensions, only a specific set, which shows restraint and implies to me they are having a sort of arms race with extensions that scrape contact info. I agree that the goal here is likely to combat scraping, but I don't think we can use this behavior to draw that conclusion. From the article: "I recommend not using web accessible resources. Out of all extensions LinkedIn finds, a majority of them are due to web accessible resources." There's no trivial way to get a list of all the user's extensions, so they needed a side channel that they could use to detect them on a case-by-case basis. The only extensions that they can detect are ones that feature this side-channel. Even if Linkedin did want to know all your extensions (which, again, I think is less plausible than an arms race) we would see this same sort of behavior due to the limitations imposed by the browser.
imglorp 7y ago
Wait, so they try like crazy to scrape YOUR contact list but fight like crazy to keep THEIRs from getting scraped.
- sb8244 7y ago
  Yes. They have gone to court for this, and I believe lost. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin-claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is-hacking/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...
- visarga 7y ago
  Yeah, just like Google bot crawls the web putting enormous load on people's servers (G-Bot can pull hundreds of thousands of pages per day from a single server), while being very sensitive to automated searches and banning your ass (IP) in a heart beat. They sure don't want to be crawled by anyone.
  - orf 7y ago
    If your site cannot handle the moderate 3-5 requests per second it would take for google to make hundreds of thousands (500k) of requests a day, then I hate to break it to you but you have bigger problems at hand.

jguffey 7y ago

There are a lot of extensions built for networking professionals (recruiters, marketers, sales people) that automate browser behavior on LinkedIn in an attempt to drum up attention. For example: automatically viewing profiles of candidates, so that the candidate sees the recruiter/sales person on their "who's viewed my profile" page. A cursory google-search for something like "linkedin browser plugin" yields tons of these types of products.

kibwen 7y ago

> They aren't blinding probing for any and all extensions, only a specific set, which shows restraint and implies to me they are having a sort of arms race with extensions that scrape contact info. I agree that the goal here is likely to combat scraping, but I don't think we can use this behavior to draw that conclusion. From the article: "I recommend not using web accessible resources. Out of all extensions LinkedIn finds, a majority of them are due to web accessible resources." There's no trivial way to get a list of all the user's extensions, so they needed a side channel that they could use to detect them on a case-by-case basis. The only extensions that they can detect are ones that feature this side-channel. Even if Linkedin did want to know all your extensions (which, again, I think is less plausible than an arms race) we would see this same sort of behavior due to the limitations imposed by the browser.

imglorp 7y ago

Wait, so they try like crazy to scrape YOUR contact list but fight like crazy to keep THEIRs from getting scraped.

sb8244 7y ago
Yes. They have gone to court for this, and I believe lost. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin-claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is-hacking/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...
visarga 7y ago
Yeah, just like Google bot crawls the web putting enormous load on people's servers (G-Bot can pull hundreds of thousands of pages per day from a single server), while being very sensitive to automated searches and banning your ass (IP) in a heart beat. They sure don't want to be crawled by anyone.
- orf 7y ago
  If your site cannot handle the moderate 3-5 requests per second it would take for google to make hundreds of thousands (500k) of requests a day, then I hate to break it to you but you have bigger problems at hand.