When users access the software, certain non-personally and personally identifiable information (the "User Information") may be collected, stored and used for business and marketing purposes, such as maintaining and improving the Services, conducting research, and monetization. If you read the privacy policy, you will come upon the following paragraphs: In addition, there is no warning while you are installing the extension or an option to disable the feature. If you don't scroll down to read all of the description, you won't notice this at all. The problem here is that most users may not see the update as it is not displayed above the fold. No personally identifying information will be captured in connection with this data. Anonymous usage and browsing activity may be collected for research purposes and may be shared in aggregate with third parties. Usage of the Awesome Screenshot browser extension requires granting it permission to capture anonymized click stream data. If you check the description of the extension on the Chrome Web Store, you will notice the following update if you scroll down. It turned out, that the Chrome extension Awesome Screenshot fed the bot, named niki-bot, urls taken from the user's browsing history.Ī closer analysis by an affected user revealed that urls were sent over plaintext while others claimed that not only urls but also session data was captured by the extension. When webmasters noticed hits to specific pages by bots, pages that bots normally don't access because they are not public and many require authentication to be accessed, they started to investigate the matter. Lately, the company behind the product has added a price comparison component to it which it removed shortly thereafter again.Īfterwards, it seems that another monetization module has been integrated into the extension. It is a screenshot taking extension for Chrome that you can use to take part of or all of a page, add annotations, blur sensitive information and upload or share the screenshot afterwards. It has more than 1.3 million users and 45,000 ratings with the average rating being five of five stars. The last two options usually come with some form of user tracking that companies add to the extension to create profiles for use in advertisement or to sell the data to other companies.Īwesome Screenshot is a very popular Chrome extension. They can ask for donations, offer a paid version, integrate a third-party monetization module in the app, or sell it to the highest bidder. When extension developers want to make money from their popular extensions, they have only a few options to do so.
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