Embed Linkedin profile page to see who visited your website

This is why I hate the term &quot;growth hacking&quot;. It encourages this kind of behavior.<p>I&#x27;d be curious to know if anyone on HN thinks that this is morally and ethically ok?<p>What happened to the good old days when &quot;growth hacking&quot; was building a good product that people want to share with each other and then making it easy for them to share?

This is also why you should segregate your browsing to different browsers and different browsing modes.<p>I personally now use two browsers for different reasons:<p>* Chrome = Gmail, Drive, Docs, Search that I wanted tracked (work related usually)<p>* Chrome Incognito = Social media (Twitter, Instagram) and sites I stay on most of the time (HN)<p>* Firefox Private Browsing = Search that I do not want tracked (shopping research usually), shopping, news sites, media sites, LinkedIn<p>One can also view these in terms of cookie&#x2F;data retention periods:<p>* Chrome = +1 week<p>* Chrome Incognito = 1 day maximum<p>* Firefox Private Browsing = Session (created and destroyed for a specific purpose, short-lived)<p>And yes, it&#x27;s not convenient as if I get an email with a link in it I will copy the link into the appropriate browser and then browse to it. But then the upside is that I don&#x27;t get tracked relentless by tracking stuff that expects cookies.<p>Oh, and I&#x27;m aware of IP tracking too. I tend to use PIA VPN for this reason and do not autoconnect to the closest place, but instead semi-randomly pick somewhere in Europe to surface from each day.

I know my browsing habits&#x2F;history is not private, and I know I am being tracked, even though I use plugins to minimize that.<p>But having a marketing person send me a personalized email slapping me in the face with that tracking by explicitly telling me that they know what web page I visited on their site... that would be a pretty big turn off for me.

Cataclysmic outcome: linkedin is embedded on a porn site&#x2F;page and starts feeding the names and professional profiles of visitors to the owner. These people are then contacted and blackmailed based on socio-economic status (e.g. targeting rich married individuals).<p>This linkedin feature has always been a pure money grabbing ploy with no merit other than the premium revenues generated from exploiting the emotional vulnerability of people and #growthinghacking needs of recruiters.

LinkedIn sets X-Frame-Options: sameorigin on requests, so this is likely to only work on old browsers (IE7 and lower, basically).

While doing this for your own profile could be useful for you and some metrics you may want, someone else could be a bit more nefarious.<p>On a high profile&#x2F;traffic blog, web app, or site - could just include some targeted, random, or interesting LinkedIn profiles, and then all of these people would be bombarded with misinformation about who&#x27;s viewed their page.<p>Want to confuse sales team at XYZ Startup Corp., sure have all of their profile links in hidden IFrames too...

That&#x27;s one more reason to use extensions like Ublock and Ghostery.

This is terri(fic|ble).

The essence of this hack is &quot;turn LinkedIn into a tracking pixel.&quot; I suppose it&#x27;s possible to do it with some other social-network-type sites too.

I have a LinkedIn profile that I&#x27;ve not updated for a long time. Have programmers here found it to be of any value, apart from being in the know of what your friends&#x2F;colleagues are up to in their careers?

I read about this over a year ago (I think it may have been on HN, though the article was different). It seemed like it might be a security flaw and that it would get resolved, but I guess not.

Interesting, I just tested this. It doesn&#x27;t work as an image or an iframe on Chrome.<p>iFrame wont work on modern browsers: Refused to display &#x27;my linkedin url&#x27; in a frame because it set &#x27;X-Frame-Options&#x27; to &#x27;sameorigin&#x27;.<p>Image also probably did not work, though Linkedin might delay reporting profile visits, any ideas?

Neat one! Not sure it will work too great for a hacker audience -- all sorts of content blockers, and they probably aren&#x27;t logged into Linkedin 24&#x2F;7 anyway -- but I really like the idea.<p>The only issue I have with this is that it tracks people on yet another part of the Internet. Same reason as why I don&#x27;t have Google Analytics or Youtube embedded videos or embedded Google Maps on my website (let alone Google Ads).

I&#x27;ve been thinking about creating a separate Chrome login for use on any browsing on social sites (FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) - maybe even a unique login for each. Would that be an effective way to isolate this type of thing?

This is interesting; I was wondering though are you really using the Chrome Scraper extension to get this data? Is there some way to run that on a schedule, or are you manually scraping periodically?

That&#x27;s actually a sneaky way of following up with people who visited your carrers page. Check their linkedin and if they are a nice candidate send them a message through linkedin.

You might not need a whole iframe. Why not just an img tag like a regular cross site request forgery over GET.<p>If the WHO isn&#x27;t logged with any js Magic it will work all the same.

I wonder what impact it has on page rank? I remember playing with 1x1 pixel links a few years back and finding my page completely disappear from Google.

I love it when people use meaningless phrases like &quot;reach out to you&quot;. It makes spam filtering so easy!

I think there are some ethical issues with this, but the idea is brilliant.

What size is the request &#x2F; overhead?

Creepy. I hope LinkedIn breaks this soon.

Can someone kill this news immediately, please?<p>We fear for our current business model.