“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.

    • lolgcat
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      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

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      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 🙃

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        Now you understand why your IT do that.

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      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?

    • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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      Those are some insultingly low offers, considering they want to malwareify (that’s totally a word now) hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

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    The extension in question is Hover Zoom+ for those who don’t want to click the link

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        If I remember correctly it zooms in images that you point at (quicker than opening the image in a new tab). I’ve been using Imagus for that.

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    I get these offers almost daily for my Chrome extension, and have done for years. I couldn’t do it to the users, but they wouldn’t be making the offers if some people weren’t accepting.

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      Exactly. I don’t get them as often as daily, but I have gotten a bunch. I just mark them as spam and move on with my life. Not only would I never sell my hard work to a shady company, but I’d also never willfully harm my user base. It’s like scam calls I suppose. To me, routine scam calls are blatantly obvious, but since I still get them so frequently, they must be fooling some people.

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    My coworker had a liver transplant. The few months leading up to it, he was really really sketchy. He said a few things that came off like he was ready to sell company secrets to find some random backalley liver.

    Desperate life issues can lead to desperate decisions, like selling out. And it’s hard to even be mad in those circumstances.

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      I wouldn’t blame them for selling out for less as much as it would suck for the people who use the product. If I had a family to take care of I would definitely sell out for a big check. Gotta take care of my own first.

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        It sounds fair, but only if we are talking about really important things under “take care of my family” and not another PS5 or a vacation.

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    They need to name and shame the people reaching out. They keep reacting them.

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    The day he sells out, I’m gonna be like, “you were the chosen one, Anashkin”

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      “You were to bring visibility to small text, not leave it under ad ID-targeted popups!”

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    The trick is to sell it at a high price and immediately fork. Get paid and fuck off.

    Then do it again and again and again. Infinite money glitch. Don’t worry about getting sued after a bit you’ll be rich enough to be immune from prosecution.

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    That’s why I’m avoiding any extension I know I really don’t need.

    I’ve already burned myself once, when Nano Defender sold out and turned into a cookie-stealing malware. By the time it was one of few adblockers that were not being blocked by adblock killers. They’ve pushed a malware update through the Chrome web store, and started exploiting stolen cookies immediately.

    It was a difficult day, where I had to explain to few of my exes that someone hacked their Instagram account due to an ad-blocker I’ve set up for them when we were dating few years ago.

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    Yes, criminal activity is everywhere, problem is we haven’t yet forbid selling of users data.

    • N4CHEM
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      And it’s very unlikely to happen, since our governments are very interested in spying us / buying our data.

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    Great suspender, ublock (not origin) and some other extensions that i cannot think of have fallen to buyouts

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      Getting them from Google is probably more expensive than trying to get a extension dev who needs money to do it.