How deceptive browser extensions snaffled up 4m users' browsing history, including Nest videos, medical history and tax returns

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/18/god-mode-antichrist.html

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It’s like “God Mode” for the internet.

Near spit my coffee onto the screen, that’s a funny ha ha, if I ever saw one.

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In an interview, Nacho Analytics founder and CEO Mike Roberts reiterated that the service is fully GDPR compliant and that the millions of people whose data is collected have expressly agreed to this arrangement.

If this becomes a big news item, I suspect Nacho Analytics might learn a very expensive lesson about how GDPR-compliant their business really is.

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Since boingboing doesn’t want to list the actual browser extensions that do this, I’ll list the ones in the article and see if boingboing takes it down.

  • Fairshare Unlock, a Chrome extension for accessing premium content for free. (A Firefox version of the extension, available here, collects the same browsing data.)
  • SpeakIt!, a text-to-speech extension for Chrome.
  • Hover Zoom, a Chrome extension for enlarging images.
  • PanelMeasurement, a Chrome extension for finding market research surveys
  • Super Zoom, another image extension for both Chrome and Firefox. Google and Mozilla removed Super Zoom from their add-ons stores in February or March, after Jadali reported its data collection behavior. Even after that removal, the extension continued to collect browsing behavior on the researcher’s lab computer weeks later.
  • SaveFrom.net Helper a Firefox extension that promises to make Internet downloading easier. Jadali observed the data collection only in an extension version downloaded from the developer. He did not observe the behavior in the version that was previously available from Mozilla’s add-ons store.
  • Branded Surveys, which offers chances to receive cash and other prizes in return for completing online surveys.
  • Panel Community Surveys, another app that offers rewards for answering online surveys.

The article says over 200 extensions are involved, but lists only these.

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I guess their defense will be:
“As you may or may not be aware, Sweden(Wherever they are) is not a state in the United States of AmericaEU.”

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I’m extremely disappointed in Mozilla about this. I’ve been thinking of changing over to Opera anyway.

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“Nacho Analytics”
“Yeah, well, they’re not yours either.”

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Are there every any good companies which claim “Analytics” as part of their moniker?

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Thanks for this. I skimmed through the (very long) original article and found the same list but it’s a shame they don’t seem to have published the full list.

Doesn’t Opera use Chrome’s extension platform? I don’t think there’s much you can do other than not use any extensions or be very vigilant about which ones you use, regardless of browser.

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There’s AnalLunatics, but they don’t have the same cachet, so to speak.

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