Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out
Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out
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.
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Been spending the past little while reading the documented offers he gets.
I feel sick to my stomach.
Was not expecting that many
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
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 🙃
Now you understand why your IT do that.
I prefer to feel proud that there are still people who don't fall for that and have values. And there always will be.
Jesus… it is time to seriously re-evaluate and pare back the extensions I use. Ugh.
Wow that is genuinely chilling
What a depressing read, thank you!
You are welcome ☺️.
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?
Those are some insultingly low offers, considering they want to malwareify (that's totally a word now) hundreds of thousands of innocent people.