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I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Obviously, the reason for banning the extension is that it prevents Google from tracking our clicks (I'm surprised i
by dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Obviously, the reason for banning the extension is that it prevents Google from tracking our clicks (I'm surprised it took them so long!) But they can't clearly spell out the reason as it would make them look bad, so they just used some template and try to sweep it under the carpet. Now that it's on HN it's no longer so easy to ignore, so I'm really curious to see what happens next.
- duskwuff 8y agoThere's a much more obvious reason: the OP's extension presumably requested permissions to inject scripts to google.com. This is a very common pattern for malicious extensions, which can use that permission to hijack the user's Google session, or to inject third-party ads into Google search result pages. Coupled with the lack of information on the extension page, it looked risky.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIf it's really so, and it's just an "AI mistake", let's see how quickly Google discovers it and apologizes to the author.
- palant 8y agoNo, the reason isn't obvious. The extension wasn't popular enough on Chrome, Google simply wouldn't bother doing anything about it. This might be a trademark issue, the extension's name has "Google" in it - then it's a major messup then, failing to spell out the correct reason. Or maybe it was flagged by some automated tool and whoever checked output of that tool didn't properly validate it. Impossible to tell from the outside.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoIt seems that they quietly brought it back without explaining the reasons. So yes, we'll never know.