<story><title>Massive spying on users of Google&apos;s Chrome shows new security weakness</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-chrome-exclusive/exclusive-massive-spying-on-users-of-googles-chrome-shows-new-security-weakness-idUSKBN23P0JO</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>The only trustworthy extensions are uBlock Origin and EFF&amp;#x27;s Privacy Badger. Everything else is best viewed as potential malware, no different than random downloadable executables.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are so important at this point they should just become part of the browser itself. They&amp;#x27;re already in a league of their own.</text></item><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>There is a web intelligence company in Israel that is known to buy popular browser extensions like “Web of Trust” and use them to exfiltrate browsing data (with tons of sensitive and personal information). They have been called out for this several times already and some of their extensions got removed from the store, they invariably turn back up again after a few weeks though (good connections to Google&amp;#x2F;Mozilla I guess). Firefox isn’t better than Chrome in that regard btw as it also turns a blind eye on this kind of data collection.&lt;p&gt;Extensions are ideal to exfiltrate data from browsers as they bypass all security measures and can literally see everything you do on every single page you visit. It still boggles my mind how you can call a browser secure and privacy-friendly (in the case of Firefox) and at the same time allow such blatant abuse for years and years. Me and other people have been pointing this out since at least 2016 and demanded better security controls for plugins &amp;#x2F; extensions but I’m getting really tired of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>esperent</author><text>I trust both of these extensions far more as extensions than I would if they were part of Chrome.</text></comment>
<story><title>Massive spying on users of Google&apos;s Chrome shows new security weakness</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-chrome-exclusive/exclusive-massive-spying-on-users-of-googles-chrome-shows-new-security-weakness-idUSKBN23P0JO</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>The only trustworthy extensions are uBlock Origin and EFF&amp;#x27;s Privacy Badger. Everything else is best viewed as potential malware, no different than random downloadable executables.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are so important at this point they should just become part of the browser itself. They&amp;#x27;re already in a league of their own.</text></item><item><author>ThePhysicist</author><text>There is a web intelligence company in Israel that is known to buy popular browser extensions like “Web of Trust” and use them to exfiltrate browsing data (with tons of sensitive and personal information). They have been called out for this several times already and some of their extensions got removed from the store, they invariably turn back up again after a few weeks though (good connections to Google&amp;#x2F;Mozilla I guess). Firefox isn’t better than Chrome in that regard btw as it also turns a blind eye on this kind of data collection.&lt;p&gt;Extensions are ideal to exfiltrate data from browsers as they bypass all security measures and can literally see everything you do on every single page you visit. It still boggles my mind how you can call a browser secure and privacy-friendly (in the case of Firefox) and at the same time allow such blatant abuse for years and years. Me and other people have been pointing this out since at least 2016 and demanded better security controls for plugins &amp;#x2F; extensions but I’m getting really tired of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AareyBaba</author><text>What makes uBlock Origin a trustworthy extension ? because it is open-source ?</text></comment>