Chrome extension maker tells of pressure to sell out
www.theregister.com
Anyone with sizable audience in this surveillance economy is invited to stuff their add-ons with tracking and ads

“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.

    • lolgcat@lemmy.ml
      34·
      11 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
      231·
      11 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 🙃

    • Blackdoomax@sh.itjust.works
      16·
      11 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.

    • celmit
      5·
      11 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·
      11 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.