From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote at 01:06 this Friday (GMT): ><https://browsergate.eu/>

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
Microsoft is running one of the largest corporate espionage operations
in modern history.
Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com,
hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it.

Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title,
it is not searching anonymous visitors. It is searching identified
people at identified companies. Millions of companies. Every day. All
over the world.

This is illegal and potentially a criminal offense in every jurisdiction
we have examined.
(If you you’re in a hurry -> read our Executive Summary)

Who we are
Fairlinked e.V. is an association of commercial LinkedIn users. We
represent the professionals who use LinkedIn, the businesses that invest
in and depend on the platform, and the toolmakers who build products for it.

BrowserGate is our investigation and campaign to document one of the
largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history,
to inform the public and regulators, to collect evidence, and to raise
funds for the legal proceedings required to stop it.

What we found
Mass breach of personal data
LinkedIn’s scan reveals the religious beliefs, political opinions, disabilities, and job search activity of identified individuals.
LinkedIn scans for extensions that identify practicing Muslims,
extensions that reveal political orientation, extensions built for neurodivergent users, and 509 job search tools that expose who is
secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current
employer can see their profile.

Under EU law, this category of data is not regulated. It is prohibited. LinkedIn has no consent, no disclosure, and no legal basis. Its privacy policy does not mention any of this.

Corporate espionage and trade secret theft
LinkedIn scans for over 200 products that directly compete with its own sales tools, including Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo. Because LinkedIn
knows each user’s employer, it can map which companies use which competitor products. It is extracting the customer lists of thousands of software companies from their users’ browsers without anyone’s knowledge.

Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has already sent enforcement
threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets.

Deceiving EU regulators
In 2023, the EU designated LinkedIn as a regulated gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act and ordered it to open its platform to third-party tools. LinkedIn’s response:

It published two restricted APIs and presented them to the European Commission as compliance. Together, these APIs handle approximately 0.07 calls per second. Meanwhile, LinkedIn already operates an internal API called Voyager that powers every LinkedIn web and mobile product at
163,000 calls per second. In Microsoft’s 249-page compliance report to
the EU, the word “API” appears 533 times. “Voyager” appears zero times.

At the same time, LinkedIn expanded its surveillance of the exact tools
the regulation was designed to protect. The scan list grew from roughly
461 products in 2024 to over 6,000 by February 2026. The EU told
LinkedIn to let third-party tools in. LinkedIn built a surveillance
system to find and punish every user of those tools.

Shipping your data to third parties
LinkedIn loads an invisible tracking element from HUMAN Security
(formerly PerimeterX), an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm, zero
pixels wide, hidden off-screen, that sets cookies on your browser
without your knowledge. A separate fingerprinting script runs from LinkedIn’s own servers. A third script from Google executes silently on every page load. All of it encrypted. None of it disclosed.

Why we need you
Microsoft has 33,000 employees and a $15 billion legal budget. We have
the evidence. What we need is people and funding to hold them accountable.

Take action →

Wow, Microsoft being invasive and violating their users privacy? I'm so shocked.

Being serious, this is legitimately disgusting.
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

On 2026-04-08 2:00 p.m., candycanearter07 wrote:

CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote at 01:06 this Friday (GMT):

<https://browsergate.eu/>

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
Microsoft is running one of the largest corporate espionage operations
in modern history.
Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com,
hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the
results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party
companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not
mention it.

Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title,
it is not searching anonymous visitors. It is searching identified
people at identified companies. Millions of companies. Every day. All
over the world.

This is illegal and potentially a criminal offense in every jurisdiction
we have examined.
(If you you’re in a hurry -> read our Executive Summary)

Who we are
Fairlinked e.V. is an association of commercial LinkedIn users. We
represent the professionals who use LinkedIn, the businesses that invest
in and depend on the platform, and the toolmakers who build products for it. >>
BrowserGate is our investigation and campaign to document one of the
largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history,
to inform the public and regulators, to collect evidence, and to raise
funds for the legal proceedings required to stop it.

What we found
Mass breach of personal data
LinkedIn’s scan reveals the religious beliefs, political opinions,
disabilities, and job search activity of identified individuals.
LinkedIn scans for extensions that identify practicing Muslims,
extensions that reveal political orientation, extensions built for
neurodivergent users, and 509 job search tools that expose who is
secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current
employer can see their profile.

Under EU law, this category of data is not regulated. It is prohibited.
LinkedIn has no consent, no disclosure, and no legal basis. Its privacy
policy does not mention any of this.

Corporate espionage and trade secret theft
LinkedIn scans for over 200 products that directly compete with its own
sales tools, including Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo. Because LinkedIn
knows each user’s employer, it can map which companies use which
competitor products. It is extracting the customer lists of thousands of
software companies from their users’ browsers without anyone’s knowledge.

Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has already sent enforcement
threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this
covert scanning to identify its targets.

Deceiving EU regulators
In 2023, the EU designated LinkedIn as a regulated gatekeeper under the
Digital Markets Act and ordered it to open its platform to third-party
tools. LinkedIn’s response:

It published two restricted APIs and presented them to the European
Commission as compliance. Together, these APIs handle approximately 0.07
calls per second. Meanwhile, LinkedIn already operates an internal API
called Voyager that powers every LinkedIn web and mobile product at
163,000 calls per second. In Microsoft’s 249-page compliance report to
the EU, the word “API” appears 533 times. “Voyager” appears zero times.

At the same time, LinkedIn expanded its surveillance of the exact tools
the regulation was designed to protect. The scan list grew from roughly
461 products in 2024 to over 6,000 by February 2026. The EU told
LinkedIn to let third-party tools in. LinkedIn built a surveillance
system to find and punish every user of those tools.

Shipping your data to third parties
LinkedIn loads an invisible tracking element from HUMAN Security
(formerly PerimeterX), an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm, zero
pixels wide, hidden off-screen, that sets cookies on your browser
without your knowledge. A separate fingerprinting script runs from
LinkedIn’s own servers. A third script from Google executes silently on
every page load. All of it encrypted. None of it disclosed.

Why we need you
Microsoft has 33,000 employees and a $15 billion legal budget. We have
the evidence. What we need is people and funding to hold them accountable. >>
Take action →

Wow, Microsoft being invasive and violating their users privacy? I'm so shocked.

Being serious, this is legitimately disgusting.

I think that the absolute worst thing I've seen on the web, in
particular, is how web sites integrated cryptominers. I always try to
stay away from automatic ad blockers, especially if there is truly a
reason to believe that the sites need that revenue to keep going, but
them using my processing power to mine for crypto while I'm on the site
is despicable. You can always see and feel the temperature rise on those
sites when it's happening. The ads themselves are annoying, but that is
much worse because in addition to annoying you, it kills your battery
life and compromises your system's overall performance.
--
CrudeSausage
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2