[kcorbitt]

This is a great cause. Just one concern: I understand the desire to quantify the difference you're making in the world, but seeing the counter that (currently) says "66 redirects have been made with this extension!" actually influenced me to not install the extension. It seems like the implementation of that could easily leak the list of things I look at on Amazon to you or others, and it shouldn't need to "phone home" like that to function as an extension. If you remove that you'll have another happy giver. :)

[jhaimson]

I completely understand - this was one of our major concerns when we were deciding whether or not we should count redirects. If you look at the function incrementCounter() in the code (https://github.com/Jdhaimson/smilealways/blob/master/chromep...) you can see that all we are doing is pinging the server without passing any information along to increment a counter each time someone is redirected.

That being said, I think I will take it off of the site because it can be scary if you don't look at the code. Thanks for the suggestion!

[mrigor]

Without rate limiting it looks be to susceptible to abuse.

[jhaimson]

Yeah, I realize this method is open to abuse. I just figured that the counter really was more of a "nice-to-have" so I can see how many times it was working, but if someone really wanted to abuse it than it wouldn't be that big of an issue. I'd have an incorrect count, but that's about it.

At the end of the day, it wasn't worth spending the initial effort to build against that. I intend on doing this in the future, but for now I'm willing to accept the risk of having an incorrect redirect count and get it out to more people in the meantime.

[jhaimson]

Decided to get rid of this tracking entirely. The newest update doesn't make any calls to any server to deal with concerns over privacy.