[ricardobeat]

> Collecting metrics about your product

This plugin is not their product, they are merely taking advantage of it's popularity for their own purposes.

> The thing is, market forces are pretty good at settling these issues

True, and the market seems to be unhappy with this approach and publicly taking a stance against it, right here. I believe this is as serious as any other case of hijacking a popular extension for collecting data, the specifics of what is being collected don't matter the littlest bit (and could change at their will).

On "positive intent": they did all of this with a commit message that doesn't mention 'Kite' at all, even uses a hardcoded IP address to avoid a domain name. It was clearly shady and meant to go unnoticed.