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by ThePhysicist
2194 days ago
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In 2016 we proved that the owner of "Web of Trust" was exfiltrating and illegally selling clickstream data to anyone who would pay. For Germany alone the data contained the browing information of more than three million people, often revealing highly intimate and sensitive details about their lives. Still, Chrome and Firefox reinstated the extension after less than four weeks, and to this day it keeps collecting clickstream data. It does so using dark patterns and I'm sure most of the users are not aware that a free extension they use to increase their safety while surfing the web surreptitiously sells their browsing data. If the main selling point of your browser or OS is that you protect the privacy of your users you simply can't act like that, because most users are not aware of the data collection that is happening via these extensions. With mobile apps we're in a similar situation, companies like X-Mode exfiltrate and sell location data via apps that claim to protect your privacy. Desktop software: Same story. Anti-virus software that is supposed to protect you actually exfiltrates personal data from your computer. So yeah if you build an open platform there will be such abuse, but if you position yourself as a champion for privacy you simply can't allow that (or at least you should try to make it more difficult). There are simple counter-measures that browser vendors could employ: Showing users how much data a given extension sends to a backend and ideally making that data transparent would be enough to stop most of these practices, because people would then realize that their free screenshot app somehow sends every single URL they open to a backend service. Right now this can happen entirely without the knowledge of the user. You can't control what you cannot see and understand. |
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Exactly! I find it abhorrent that not even Firefox has something straightforward like that as a “first-class” feature. Most of the extensions I use shouldn't need to communicate with any server at all to begin with, so having to just trust the author's words or manually audit the code on every update (or stop them altogether) and maybe fork the project (if that's even possible)... Doesn't make sense.
The one thing I'm aware of that these extensions could do to sidestep such a mechanism is to inject scripts on pages that then exfiltrate your data, but injection could also be blocked, and as a last resort I trust uMatrix would have me covered ;)