[Jach]

Very interesting analysis. The dark arts are dangerous! If I were cdata, I would have just said "If you don't like it, use noscript." I've been using noscript (and adblock plus) on Firefox for quite some time now, and every time I give the internet a chance and browse without it I'm always disappointed. If having annoying sites wrecks the internet, I consider it already wrecked.

I think the privacy issues have been understated. My first thought was to wave it off as "they're not seeing anything that's not public text anyway", since I was placing it in the context of reading a NYT article or something. But what if a web admin adds this plugin to a site on areas that aren't public? Two (probably unlikely, but I don't have much data) scenarios that came to my mind were: A viewer highlights their bank account number, oh look, CloudFlare has that now (and if it's context-aware can piece together what the number means). A site offers a random password generator, user highlights it to copy/paste it--oops.

Here's hoping that if Linux's Chromium gets this 'feature' baked in, it's opt-in only.