‘Approached by malware companies’ĭevelopers of larger Chrome extensions have been approached in a similar manner by third parties. The unknown new owner had then added code into the browser extension, which was silently installed on users’ computers through the update mechanism, to serve invasive advertising as people browsed the internet.Ī similar situation has occurred with another small extension called “Tweet This Page”, which was silently altered to serve ads, redirect links and hijack Google searches. "It was a four-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal," wrote Amit Agarwal, developer of Add to Feedly. The developer of one extension, “Add to Feedly” which had around 32,000 users, revealed how he had sold his extension to an unknown buyer for an undisclosed small sum. Invasive advertising tools, or adware, have taken advantage of the automatic update feature of Google’s Chrome browser that allows the browser and extensions to be silently updated in the background without user interaction. Google’s Chrome web store policies specifically prevent developers from inserting advertising on more than one part of a page, with strict guidelines to which they must adhere.
Extensions are normally used to add specific functions to a browser, much like apps on a mobile phone, which add new features or removing others, such as blocking adverts or adding quick links to other services including Twitter and Facebook.
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