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Firefox and Chrome removed a browser extension from their stores following the revelations they received with user browsing history.
The "Stylish" plug-in has gained popularity as it allows users to configure the appearance of sites. than to accept the decisions of the designers.
However – stop us if you've heard this one before – the code has changed hands in the last year and the new owners have expanded its data recovery business.
Look what was sent to the owners of Stylish, the SimilarWeb badysis company, and horrified.
Like the Heaton blog, "HTTP requests that send a big blob of obfuscated data to a URL ending with / stats are almost never good news for users."
While the privacy policy of SimilarWeb for the style indicates that she only collects anonymous data, Heaton found that he was attaching an identifier to the data returned to the company.
"I looked more closely at the decoded payload, noted a unique tracking identifier," he wrote, adding "there is only one tracking request containing a cookie." session to permanently badociate a user account with an elegant tracking ID, which means that Stylish and SimilarWeb always have all the data they need to link a real identity to a browsing history, if they or a hacker choose to do so . "
Mozilla's additional reviewers decided Stylish, as it is currently, is out of line and made the extension unavailable for Firefox users (though it does require manual deletion for current users).
A message from Andreas Wagner was unequivocal: "We decided to block because of the violation of practices described in the review policy. "
Always Popular After His Disappearance
As you can see above, Stylish was popular enough to be a top-page search result for" Chrome Extensions ", but it is now removed from the Google Extensions Store.
Register has asked SimilarWeb to comment. ®
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