Tootfinder

Every time you visit LinkedIn in Chrome, a hidden routine silently probes your browser for more than 6,000 installed extensions, collects 48 hardware and software characteristics about your device, encrypts the resulting fingerprint, and attaches it to every API request you make during your session.
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LinkedIn is secretly scanning your browser for 6,000 extensions, and you weren’t told
In short: Every time you visit LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, a hidden JavaScript routine silently probes your browser for more than 6,000 installed extensions, collects 48 hardware and software characteristics about your device, encrypts the resulting fingerprint, and attaches it to every API request you make during your session. The practice, labelled “BrowserGate” by researchers, […]

A new silly browser extension to add a colorful moving background to mastodon. This has no functionality but make me happy.
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mastodon-busy-background/
Chrome:

~The Claude Desktop App installs its browser extension into 7 different browsers without consent automatically. This is very much not cool.~
Edit: I misread the article, and this is not what is happening. Instead, these files that are installed allow for easier installing of the actual browser extensions, which is much less evil. No browser extensions are automatically installed. Thanks to @…

Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop — That Privacy Guy!
Anthropic's Claude Desktop silently installs a Native Messaging bridge into seven Chromium browsers, including browsers Anthropic's own documentation says it does not support, and browsers the user has not even installed.

I‘m kind of annoyed that the #PrivacyGuy article on the #Claude extension bridge preprovisioning (which I consider overblown) gets so much airtime on here, when there is actually relevant research on the train wreck that is the chrome extension itself. It allows anyone with local code execution …

How we hijacked a browser through Claude's Chrome extension | Origin
By Matt Hand on 2026-03-30

Recently, an independent study used a browser extension to show that
re-ranking content within X’s algorithmic feed
by moving up or down posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity
influenced affective polarization
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc

is there a browser extension to make the dimensions of any rendered element immutable

#Shitpost #Shitposting #ShamelesslyStolenFromSomewhereElseOnTheInternetHonestlyICantKeepTrackOfThisStuffAnymore

Someone wrote a viral article claiming that Claude installs Spyware on your computer. The technical observation is real, but the threat is not. I took a closer look, and I would argue that the real issue with the Claude extension is somewhere else entirely, and I've seen little discussion on it: Matt Hand at Origin found that the extension actually allows almost *any* software on your machine to control your browser.
I wrote it up as an example for how threat modeling can be helpfu…