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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

> Extensions have a scary level of access (they're basically almost as easy to use as a website, but with unlimited powers such as recording every site you visit and stealing passwords), and the average user will never understand that.

Seems to me that the solution to that is to make permissions extremely granular and grade the level of review scrutiny an extension gets by its permission granularity. Then, only extensions that want to access or modify something truly sensitive would run the risk of getting smacked down randomly like this (as is always liable to happen with an automated process).

Not just "read all websites" but "read the URL only", "read the visuals but not the HTML/CSS", "inject predefined code onto only website X".

It also incentivises extensions to ask for less permissions so they can pass review more quickly.

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Average users are absolutely not gonna read all that stuff, much less understand it, when they accidentally install a malicious extension. I'm all for more powerful browser extensions (I really miss vimperator...), and I agree that permissions should be more granular, but I don't think that's gonna fix the issues that the average user of chrome has with them.

I dont think they were talking about average users reading it, but rather permissions are used as a trigger for the thoroughness / rigour of review scrutiny. Ie, this is a proposal to help the pulish/takedown issue, rather than to help users make better decisions.

Seriously. It is completely unacceptable that the default level of access has become "everything."

To be fair, Chrome has been really restricting access. The past year or two, they've gotten really fine-grained. You have to ask for every permission, and even explain to the reviewer why you need it.

> It is completely unacceptable that the default level of access has become "everything."

Even on Android (and I presume iPhone) where apps ask for/document their permissions requirements, most people just say "Yes" and move along. Most people have neither the time nor the expertise to critically evaluate whether or not an extension needs any of a dozen permissions.

I sympathize, but I have no idea how you can realistically solve this.

it shouldn't be necessary for users to know this because the permission-granting relationship is potentially adversarial, so the user will always be on the back foot unless they're technical/power users. It should be Google's responsibility to ensure that extensions only request the permissions they need.

> It should be Google's responsibility...

That seems ripe for more of the same articles of this flavor. The specifics would probably be just something akin to "turns out that using this permission in a way that Google didn't anticipate immediately gets your app shelved and leads to loss of users."

If you extrapolate down the fine-grained-permissions line, you eventually end up with effectively a legal system where the rules are encoded explicitly (and enforced programmatically) but the spirit-vs-letter of the law is left to interpretation by a judge (the reviewer in this case).

That's probably better than the scenario we have right now. Such a system of smaller permissions would be an improvement over every extension asking for all permissions and being able to do what they want with your browser.

Chrome permissions work like this and are quite fine-grained.

When an extension update changes the required permissions it gets disabled and you get a prompt to re-enable with the changed permissions.

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