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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

I can’t speak for others, but I don’t like the clutter and potential security/privacy issues. I am not saying there are such issues, but it “feels” like there could be. I don’t have the time or desire to heavily vet extensions so I tend to avoid them. What they say they do and what they actually do — hard for me to quickly be able to verify them.

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To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. Hope this clarifies.

> To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc

That's not the whole truth - you are using Google Analytics to track visitors and you fail to disclose this in your privacy policy, despite this being mandatory under the Google Analytics T&C's.

Well done launching what looks like a very cool project, and I hope you can further improve it by informing visitors that you are using Google Analytics to track them (or even drop GA completely in favor of something privacy friendly).

We are using Google Analytics only on the website, it will not (and do not have access to) collect extension user data. However, you are right that we should've mentioned this in our privacy policy. We're on it :)

That’s nice. However, with a website, I don’t have to even worry about it as much. Basically “trust us” is a high bar to clear because the potential to gather data is still there.

Good luck with your thing. I am sure you did a ton of work; I am just naturally risk-adverse when it comes to installing extensions that that a potential to do things I might not want.

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