You just need to sign up. And then they send you spam to make you think "I'm sure I ticked the no email box".
" * Your data on all websites
* Your tabs and browsing history "
The reason for the first is that it needs to be able to modify every page you are looking at to block the ads. The reason for the second is that it needs access to the Tab API (to get the name/URL of a webpage you view, presumably to make use of white/black lists.)
There is a ton of software on my computer that "has access" to my "data" and "network traffic": the kernel, network stack, clients, filesystem drivers, etc.
What they don't do is go tattling all this crap back to some mothership (or at least they'd better damned well not be).
Where Android / iPhone apps and Chrome extensions start freaking the living crap out of me is where they say they "require" this access ... and I don't (short of setting up some network traffic instrumentation) know off-hand whether this is staying local to the app or getting broadcast to the world. Or some big brotherly subset of the world.
Sure you have to trust it, and you are generally right to be paranoid about Chrome extensions, but on the positive side, the extensions are somewhat more limited in the bad things they can do compared to non-sandboxed native desktop apps, and the source code is always available (although at times obfuscated and can be updated automatically) since they are written in JavaScript.
But you really shouldn't have to do that. Nor should anyone else for that matter.
Then sort out which of the traffic is germane and which is not. This isn't trivial even for a technical person, let alone the lay public.
Delete?
It's like reading CNet.
Someone should write an app that turns shitty articles across lots of pages into one page!