" #BrowserGate is not one thing. It is several things operating simultaneously:
It is a mass privacy violation affecting every Chrome user who visits #LinkedIn.
It is an illegal profiling system that collects data on religion, politics, health, and employment status, tied to verified real-world identities.
It is a corporate intelligence operation that maps the technology stacks, security postures, and internal cultures of tens of millions of companies.
It is a trade secret extraction machine that compiles customer lists for 6,222 software vendors without their knowledge or consent.
It is a tool for surveilling government employees, including the very regulators and legislators responsible for overseeing LinkedIn’s compliance with the law.
And it is a monopoly maintenance mechanism, designed to identify and suppress the users of competing tools on a platform where users have no meaningful alternative.
One company, owned by the largest software corporation on earth, with 1.2 billion users’ verified professional identities, decided to silently scan every visitor’s browser for installed software and transmit the results, encrypted, to its servers. No consent. No disclosure. No oversight.
The question is not whether this violates the law. We have documented that. The question is whether the institutions responsible for enforcing the law will act before LinkedIn finishes building the most comprehensive corporate and government intelligence database ever assembled by a private company."
BrowserGate
This Is Not Just a Privacy Violation
When people hear that LinkedIn scans browser extensions without consent, the first reaction is usually about personal privacy. That reaction is cor...
#infosec #Linux #root #vulnerability
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