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Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out (www.theregister.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by aranym@lemmy.name to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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"Actors who are asking me to add some tracking code are mostly interested in reselling users' data," Anashkin said. "Actors who want to purchase it outright will stuff it with malware depending on their level of greed: hijacking affiliate links, tampering with search results, showing popups with shady websites, etc."

Anashkin's experience appears to be fairly common. Developers have discussed these solicitations in online forums and several have written blog posts about selling extensions or partnership offers.

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[-] unscholarly_source@lemmy.ca 187 points 10 months ago

Been spending the past little while reading the documented offers he gets.

I feel sick to my stomach.

[-] psyc@lemmy.world 39 points 10 months ago

Was not expecting that many

[-] lolgcat@lemmy.ml 34 points 10 months ago

Props to Oleg/hoverzoom for maintaining and updating this list for all to read. It's my first time seeing any document of this kind really. Quiet chilling

[-] Doombot1@beehaw.org 22 points 10 months ago

Wowza. That’s terrible. Thank goodness he hasn’t sold out; I love hoverzoom. If only my freaking work’s IT wouldn’t’ve banned extensions 🙃

[-] Llewellyn@lemmy.ml 32 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Now you understand why your IT do that.

[-] Blackdoomax@sh.itjust.works 16 points 10 months ago

I prefer to feel proud that there are still people who don't fall for that and have values. And there always will be.

[-] Snowcano@startrek.website 14 points 10 months ago

Jesus… it is time to seriously re-evaluate and pare back the extensions I use. Ugh.

[-] Slowy@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

Wow that is genuinely chilling

[-] salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 9 points 10 months ago

What a depressing read, thank you!

[-] unscholarly_source@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

You are welcome ☺️.

[-] celmit@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago

1/25/2021

We'd love to have redacted sponsor Hover Zoom+ in a similar manner to how we're partnering with Dark Reader. See attached for how that partnership has come to life, but we're honestly super flexible on implementation. We'd essentially love to pay you in exchange for helping us drive users to redacted.

So wtf does this mean? Is Dark Reader hammered as of 2021?

[-] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 2 points 10 months ago

Those are some insultingly low offers, considering they want to malwareify (that's totally a word now) hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023

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