There is a web intelligence company in Israel that is known to buy popular browser extensions like “Web of Trust” and use them to exfiltrate browsing data (with tons of sensitive and personal information). They have been called out for this several times already and some of their extensions got removed from the store, they invariably turn back up again after a few weeks though (good connections to Google/Mozilla I guess). Firefox isn’t better than Chrome in that regard btw as it also turns a blind eye on this kind of data collection.
Extensions are ideal to exfiltrate data from browsers as they bypass all security measures and can literally see everything you do on every single page you visit. It still boggles my mind how you can call a browser secure and privacy-friendly (in the case of Firefox) and at the same time allow such blatant abuse for years and years. Me and other people have been pointing this out since at least 2016 and demanded better security controls for plugins / extensions but I’m getting really tired of it.
Extensions are ideal to exfiltrate data from browsers as they bypass all security measures and can literally see everything you do on every single page you visit. It still boggles my mind how you can call a browser secure and privacy-friendly (in the case of Firefox) and at the same time allow such blatant abuse for years and years. Me and other people have been pointing this out since at least 2016 and demanded better security controls for plugins / extensions but I’m getting really tired of it.