[benatkin]

If it's found to be grabbing more data than it should, people can report them and the extension can be banned from the Chrome Web Store.

It's not ideal but in order to make utilities that work on every page, these permissions are needed.

The code inside the extension bundle (.crx) would need to contain the potential for abuse, and if it gets popular enough, security researchers will look at it. Even if it's not popular, incentives will be at work, because it would be a foolish risk for a company to ship code that could expose a user's entire browser history into the extension, because at any point someone could take a look at the bundle and find the flaw.

[seantomburke]

It's all about building trust with the company. We don't store or read any information on the sites you visit, we just redirect URLs that contain "go" as the domain, and provide a link for any "go/" links in your browser. We would never risk compromising that trust.

If you take a look at a company like Grammarly, they've built trust with their users, which is why they can have the "Read and modify all data on all sites" and still have 10 million customers. We plan to build the same trust with our customers.