Google purges bad extensions from Chrome
This is fantastic news.<p>The Quick Note Chrome extension from Diigo (now removed) submits every URL visited to a third-party server and those URLs are then crawled the next day.<p>We just switched our 25 member customer service team to Chromeboxes and were very concerned to find soon after that an EC2-based crawler was querying private URLs of our platform.<p>Because the Chrome Web Store had not banned bad actors like Diigo, we now blacklisted all Chrome extensions except for a very small number that I personally approve. Rather than feeling that ChromeOS was improving our security, we had our chief software architect spend most of the weekend figuring out who was targeting our platform. (All queries received 404 errors, but we remained concerned whether the rogue extension could read the submitted form credentials or the cookie store to get access.)<p>Rogue extensions are wasting a huge amount of time and destroying trust in the Chrome platform. Here's some more detail on similar stories about Diigo:<p><a href="https://chrisa.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/chrome-extensions-going-rogue/" rel="nofollow">https://chrisa.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/chrome-extensions-go...</a>
<a href="https://mig5.net/content/awesome-screenshot-and-niki-bot" rel="nofollow">https://mig5.net/content/awesome-screenshot-and-niki-bot</a><p>I am thrilled to see Google finally acting to restore trust in their platform.<p>Update: Google removed Diigo Quick Note, but still has Awesome Screenshot <<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/diigo?hl=en-US>" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/diigo?hl=en-US></a> which captures the identical data and sells it to third party crawlers.