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Comment by paulirish | Hacker News Reader

In the extension text, they say: "This extension is ad supported, you can disable your support by going to the options and making a one-time donation. We depend on your support, but we understand if you would prefer to withhold it."

This, from what I can tell, plays within the bounds of Chrome's policy on extensions.

(I also spent some time looking at the extension source to verify that the only annoying thing they do is inject ads according to this whitelist: http://goo.gl/3WAej6 Nothing else caught my eye. )

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https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/program_polic...

Of all the stuff under "Interfering with Third-party Ads and Websites", it only complies with "This behavior is clearly disclosed to the user." IMO obviously.

The extension did more than just add ads. A javascript listener for the click event was attach to each link on the result page.

If the user hovered with his mouse over a link, he couldn't tell the link would lead him to http://www.ecosia.org/. But this is exactly what was happening, because the click listener was changing the URL only after the user clicked.

So now the user was redirected to http://www.ecosia.org/ along with a bunch of parameters, including the original query and the original URL, and from there http://www.ecosia.org/ redirected the user to the original URL (after logging whatever it wanted to log), without the user having a way to notice what had just happened (unless looking in the dev console).

The fact that the URL was changed only after the user clicked is quite a hint that deception was intended there.

Paul was talking about a different extension, but anyway...

The onclick event listener is the same thing Google does with the search results. Perform a search on Google and right-click a link, then you'll see the URL changes to the a Google proxy server that collects data about your click for analytics purposes. The reason is so the whole process is more transparent and the users can see the actual URL they end up with when clicking the link. The intention was not to hide anything, but to keep things as unobtrusive as possible. I'm sorry if it felt any other way!

Seems like the quintessential dark pattern is to have a "feature" like this enabled by default. Further, I discovered that the feature would re-enable on a regular cadence - perhaps every time the extension was updated.

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