Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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There's also a tremendous difference between:

1. "Extension sees data on pages for which it's activated, and might modify that all kept locally", and

2. "Extension sends all page information to The Cloud^W^W Somebody Else's Computer where it is probably being shared with umpteen third parties, advertising^W behavioural manipulation and surveillance organisations, and will be preserved in crystal until the Heat Death Of The Universe.

Why desktop, and most especially mobile platforms / operating systems fail to either distinguish or permit control between these two scenarios is ... utterly beyond me.

There is Steve Krenzel's recent account of being pressured, by both a Twitter marketing exec and the phone company requesting the feature, to track "when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day".

This should not even be possible, let alone invisible to the device owner.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33511016>

<https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html>

The reputational harm that this does to the company, to mobile computing, to Web 2.0, to the start-up sector, and to the infotech sector as a whole really cannot be overstated.

Burn it down.

There’s no practical way to distinguish between these two options for web extensions: once the extension can fiddle with the HTML on the page, it can use that power to make network requests (trivially, by inserting <img> tags onto the page).

Hrm...

That does make things more complicated.

The dynamic nature of HTML as a whole means that 1) page contents can change interactively and 2) follow-up network requests can be made.

Limiting that would be difficult, and might require something like, spitballing here:

- Limiting extension functionality to subtractive network requests, or specifically permitted requests. Given that I've just installed LibRedirect, which points surveillanceware sites (Twitter, YT, Reddit, Instagram, etc.) to open, less-surveilled alternatives, I'm already contradicting myself here.

- Limiting extension functionality to changing displayed content after an initial pre-render has been achieved. sort of:

  { Web } <-> { Unmodified fetch } <-> { Extension } <-> { Displayed content }

That ... obviously ... fails to work for any number of content blocking or tracker-blocking tools (uMatrix, Ghostery, amongst others).

This leaves us with the option of tools which are audited and certified as to behaviour, have some specifically limited sets of requests, and require those back-ends to treat any such requests in specific manners which preserve privacy and confidentiality. That's a lot more cumbersome, and doesn't work off simple allow/deny rules on-device.

Thanks for the reality slap.

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