Google and Mozilla remove browser extension

Science



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The stylish browser module spies out all the URLs visited for over a year, according to a blogger. Now, browser providers have become active.

Until recently, the "Stylish" extension was still considered a particularly clever add-on, with which it was possible to change the appearance of visited sites to their liking. On the extension website, users can now download many styles for popular sites such as Amazon, Ebay and Google to customize them to their liking. Recently, however, software engineer Robert Heaton discovered that Stylish was collecting the full user browsing history since the beginning of 2017 and sending it to their servers with a unique identifier .

Disastrous end to Stylish

But under Firefox and Chrome, this is no longer possible. Mozilla and Google have both responded quickly and removed the extension from their stores. Anyone who wants to call them there will only receive error messages. As existing users have reported in the elegant official forum, Firefox has also asked them to uninstall the extension.

Heaton points out that Stylish's curiosity was known in principle for almost a year and a half. Bleeping Computer had reported the sale of the extension to SimilarWeb, which resulted in a change in the privacy policy of the add-on. But this has hardly interested anyone for a long time. Only Heaton got to notice him again. He noticed that his browser sent many data packets to the address api.userstyles.org. Userstyles.org is the official web address of Stylish.

After several attempts, Heaton was able to decrypt the minimum encrypted data packets. In addition to the URLs that he visited, the module also sent a unique identifier to its creators. After posting the blog article on his private page, the ball started rolling. Several media reports have resulted in the ban on extension by Google and Mozilla. How is it going now with Stylish, is still not clear. SimilarWeb has not yet commented on the allegations.

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