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Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

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Re: Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

#3

Browser extensions have much looser security than you would think: any extension, even if it just claims to change a style of a website, can see your input type=password fields - it's ludicrous that access to those does not need its own permission !

It's hard to see how you would implement that, any script run within the context of the page needs access to these fields for backwards compatibility reasons, so the context script of the extension would just need to find a way of running code in the context of the page to exfiltrate the data. It could do this by adding script tags, etc.

Re: Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

#6

And the ones that are not will probably get bought out at some point and become malware as well. The only extension I trust enough to install on any browser is uBlock Origin.

I have published an extension [1] that has 100k+ users and I've probably received hundreds of emails over the years asking me to sell out in one way or another. It's honestly relentless. For that reason I also only trust uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and my own extensions.

I'd also note that all this spam is via the public email address you're forced to add to your extension listing by Google. I don't think I've ever had a single legitimate email sent to it. So yeh, thanks Google.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/old-reddit-redirect...

Re: Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

#10

And the ones that are not will probably get bought out at some point and become malware as well. The only extension I trust enough to install on any browser is uBlock Origin.

I have published an extension [1] that has 100k+ users and I've probably received hundreds of emails over the years asking me to sell out in one way or another. It's honestly relentless. For that reason I also only trust uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and my own extensions. I'd also note that all this spam is via the public email address you're forced to add to your extension listing by Google. I don't think I've ever had…

Just to say thanks for this extension, and keeping Reddit usable (at least for me).
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