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Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

What if you trust your extensions more than the websites you visit? You will have a few extensions and hundreds or thousands of websites.

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It's very difficult for users to make these decisions in an informed way, for either websites or extensions. The browser highly distrusts websites by default and doesn't give users many options to change that. Plus most people have some notion of how trustworthy 'the internet' is and act accordingly.

This isn't the case for extensions and I think it's become clear over the years it can't be fixed with various trust knobs so they're left with fiddling with the capabilities/trying to fix the overly permissive design.

The old "but think of the old people argument" used to remove our ownership of our devices and freedom to do what we want.

Either it is my device that I own and I can make decisions for or it isn't, and if it doesn't belong to me then who does it belong to?

Inter-networked connectivity made this style ownership model untenable though since the 90s - the amount of harm an application can do now that it can receive remote instructions and siphon off data has increased.

Hence software publication tied to real-world identity, sandboxing to reduce access to local sensitive data, entitlements to enumerate needs for local capabilities and a review process both to restrict unnecessary entitlements and put additional non-technically-enforceable restrictions on software.

Maybe if GDPR-like regulations were not laxly enforced or non-existent, the platforms would need to do less policing themselves.

This is extremely patronizing to users.

'users' is an extremely broad category. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution. There's probably some hundred million users who can, on average, make good decisions about extensions. There's also hundreds of millions of users who are children or are otherwise unable to make good decisions about extensions. Google, corporations in general, will force a 1 size fits all solution even when it doesn't, because it is cheaper/more profitable.

How am I supposed to understand whether extensions are stealing my data?

I've made browser extensions and I find it difficult to make an informed decision!

It is not a user’s expectation of responsibility - they aren’t going to track that an extension’s automatic update turned it from a coupon clipper to a surveillance engine. If we make this the user’s responsibility, there would be immense harm.

Maybe then auto-updating is the problem here. Why can't users have the agency to decide if they want to update or not? I know Microsoft/Google for one spearheaded the whole It's For Your Own Good movement, but opting out should at least be an option...

The call is coming from inside the house, though. The problem here is largely one of perverse incentives. The fact that Microsoft and Google both offer web browsers AND benefit from spying on people USING web browsers means that I automatically distrust 100% of whatever they're trying to do with browsers and/or web standards.

I feel like the real solution here is simply to pop up a big scary warning whenever you try to install an extension that says: "Hey, this extension will be able to read and/or modify your internet traffic. It could steal your bank account information. Are you really sure you trust the developer of this thing that much?".

Or, you could make two tiers of extensions, where one tier is the "harmless" tier that can't actually do anything with requests and responses or modify the DOM, and the other is the "advanced" tier that displays the big scary warning above.

But, honestly, that should be about it. There are a few things we need to remember for some context, IMO:

* 99% (made up number) of web users don't install extensions, anyway. This is more true the less savvy the person is. * A web browser isn't going to stop the user from downloading virus.exe or from installing SpyBrowserMaxx.app on their computers, so how much effort is really reasonable to try to prevent users from installing bad extensions? * Hindering good extensions, like uBlockOrigin, actively HARMS the privacy and security of browser users.

Let's not be tricked into giving up our own ability to fight against tracking and spying for the mythical Grandma who installs browser extensions from sketchy side-channels (is that even possible anymore in either Chrome or Firefox?).

Even more, what if you trust uBO more than Google Chrome?

I do, that’s why I use firefox.

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