4 ms·
Chrome extensions are gold mine for data collectors. There are no checks and balances and its extremely hard to tell what these extensions really do under the h
by telltruth 8y ago
Chrome extensions are gold mine for data collectors. There are no checks and balances and its extremely hard to tell what these extensions really do under the hood. A well funded data collector can make "free" extension that competes with other top extensions like AdBlock and slip in the malware to track pretty much everything that goes in the browser. I've already seen several variations where you go on some bad website and you see ad for "People are saving 40% on Amazon using this Extension! Are you using it?". I can imagine legions of gullible people falling for this and handing over control of their browser.
It's quite unfortunate the position Chrome developers have taken on extensions ("it's your problem if you use them"). We are sitting on a time bomb that one day would explode with same fervor as what happened with FB's ignorance policies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ben_jones 8y agoI've been developing a few internal chrome apps for my company recently and you're mostly right. Most chrome applications ask for essentially r/w access to the page and users don't understand what it means to click yes. With this you are essentially keylogging yourself on every single website you visit. Like damn. I will say it is possible to view the manifest.json file of any installed application, meaning you can get a complete list of all allowed permissions and any host based restrictions 'good' chrome apps will often include. Google and other browser vendors know what's happening. They know how many users have agreed to what permissions. They know most chrome apps ask for excessive permissions. It's just like Android. The right thing is to invest in more robust permission systems and training users indirectly to understand permissions better, but that would lose them money so they don't.
- mirimir 8y agoIs Firefox better? If so, how?
- keraf 8y agoYes. When submitting an extension on the Firefox Add-Ons store, the extension is validated by a human (you need to provide the source and steps to build the extension if the submitted package contains minified code). It can be frustrating sometimes to wait hours or days for the extension to be published compared to the Chrome Store where it is almost instant. But from a user perspective, I prefer it that way and Mozilla seems to care more.