endsofinvention

The "mystery" company behind the extensions is Genimous, parent company of Polarity Technologies. Polarity owns the extension referenced in the Awake blog post:

https://awakesecurity.com/blog/google-doppelganger-malicious...

Update: Medium has restored the article. The Chinese troll army failed to suppress the news for long.

Please see a screenshot of the full article here:

https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0

For the data table, go here:

https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx

It looks like this company is trying very hard to suppress this news. A media blackout might work in China, but not in America.

I am in contact with Medium to get the article restored. If anyone has a Medium contact, any help would be appreciated.

They use Bing for their search results and ads. Microsoft does all the work to onboard advertisers.

These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox.

A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.

They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.

Google Ads allow audience targeting based on user interests or affinity groups. This is inferred using past Google searches and pages visited. An advertiser can add as many of these groups as they want to a campaign and get visibility into their visitors' interests.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497941?hl=en