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Comment by byoogle | Hacker News Reader

The reason we use this permission is that we request an image from the source url to show you in each notification, but see my earlier comment about the mvp-ness of this project (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9612790) – in future iterations, we’d create our own api and just require access to http://top.hn/.

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While I understand that, there have been many extensions that have been sold and turned to malware, so I do not trust Chrome extensions any more than I trust executables downloaded from ThePirateBay, unless the extension demands reasonable permissions. I know that Chrome doesn't have a good permission model or a review process, but I still won't install your extension though.

We’re not going to sell this extension to be turned into malware! I suspect I’m not going to be able to convince you with a comment, though. :-)

You could open source it

Yeah, we probably will. We seem to be getting enough installs already to justify putting more dev cycles in. :-)

Chrome extensions already are open source (so to speak). They're simply .zip bundles, which run HTML, CSS and JS in the context of the page/browser [0]. The location depends on OS, but its pretty easy to find [1].

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/overview

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/14544700/2078412

This extension will help you find the source for any extension you encounter on the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

That's not enough, as the behavior can be updated by Chrome to a new version without noticing me the user.

I'm with bad_user. In the interest of mvp-ness, not showing this image at all (and not requesting these permissions) would have resulted in me installing the extension with no extra effort on your part (presumably.) As it is, I won't install this :/

This is not a valid reason. Having access to all my private data, my banking website, my gmail, and anything else you want is unacceptable. I'm shocked that anyone at all would install your extension.

It's no wonder so much private data is leaked all the time when people make our these sorts of permissions are acceptable and defend them when questioned.

I don't care about your reasons. Just don't ask for this permission. I'd like to use your app (I really don't care about the image), but this is a deal breaker. I just can't take the risk.

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