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by xp84 130 days ago
I mean, regardless of who they are or even if you don’t like what LinkedIn does themselves with the data people have given them, the random third parties with the extensions don’t additionally deserve to just grab all that data too, do they?
3 comments
mathfailure 130 days ago
Surely they do! The data is in the public internets, aren't they?
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ronsor 130 days ago
They'd put Widevine or PlayReady DRM on the website if they could, I'm sure.
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bigfishrunning 130 days ago
why can't they?
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direwolf20 129 days ago
because they're only for video files?
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hsbauauvhabzb 130 days ago
I say the same thing about my start menu sending every action I perform to bing.
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josephg 130 days ago
Eh. I worked at a company which made an extension which scraped LinkedIn. We provided a service to recruiters, who would start a hiring process by putting candidates into our system.

The recruiters all had LinkedIn paid accounts, and could access all of this data on the web. We made a browser extension so they wouldn’t need to do any manual data entry. Recruiters loved the extension because it saved them time.

I think it was a legitimate use. We were making LinkedIn more useful to some of their actual customers (recruiters) by adding a somewhat cursed api integration via a chrome extension. Forcing recruiters to copy and paste did’t help anyone. Our extension only grabbed content on the page the recruiter had open. It was purely read only and scoped by the user.

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xp84 130 days ago
Doesn't sound like your operation was particularly questionable, but I can imagine there must be some of those 3,000 extensions where the data flow isn't just "DOM -> End User" but more of a "Dom -> Cloud Server -> ??? -> Profit!" with perhaps a little detour where the end user gets some value too as a hook to justify the extension's existence.
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RHSman2 130 days ago
I started their but it felt like a dodgy way (as it could be seen to be illegal). We then just went aloffical and went through Google search API’s with LinkedIn as the target. Worked a treat and was cheaper than recruiter!!!

So when pay the highest scraper, it’s ok! Same data, different manner.

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