447
Over 80 Chrome Extensions Found Selling Their Users Data - And It’s All Completely Legal
(layerxsecurity.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
447 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
84222 readers
5858 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nobody should still be using Chrome after they killed proper ad blocking. The browser is a legitimate security threat.
It's kinda sad, seeing how far it has fallen. Chrome was an absolute beast of a browser back in the Windows 7 days.
when i uninstalled chrome long time ago, i immidiately noticed that my pc performance improved. it slows down your computer even if its not on
I bet it really was on! A lot of Windows programs install companion apps that aren't highly visible, but run in the background all the time to do things like load up some of the main program's libraries to make the app seem to start faster when you run it, as well as check for updates on its own, phone home about whatever they want, and watch to make sure it is the default application vs any competing apps on the system with similar functionality, etc.
Note that a lot of that functionality is of little too no benefit to the user, but the app is shamelessly using the user's stuff without really asking, including sometimes to the point where it makes your computer run worse.
They killed uBlock Origin. Fortunately uBlock Origin Lite has been working with Cromite, but I'm holding onto my Ungoogled Chromium install with full uBlock Origin till my dying breath.
But why do you love helping Google control web standards, when you could just be using a Mozilla-based browser instead?
Because Mozilla has their heads up their asses and won't implement tab groups on mobile
Now hold up there, pardner! I didn't mention that I also use IronFox and LibreWolf/Mullvad! And honestly, Cromite has been crashing on me so much that I've switched my primary browser to IronFox.
Could they stop fucking with ironfox though please, for the love of god stop changing the UI on me. I just want a browser that stays the same and works for years, my habits are consistently wrecked with each passing update
👆
i have morons still saying they use chrome because of it's profiles. you can't unfix the stupid, there's too much of it.
But... tons of browsers have that.
I use firefox because of its containers
I use chromium for some sites since i have written an extension that gives me dark mode for all sites. And firefox demands that all extensions have to be signed.
There are darkmode extensions for firefox. Or do you like to use your own?
Yeah. I try to keep the number of regular extensions low for security and privacy reasons.
You can probably port it to a userscript without much trouble, and then you can use it in every browser using a single extension/addon along with other userscripts (which you can easily read the source code and disable auto updates of). I use Violentmonkey and have written a few scripts. Development and usage is easier than extensions/addons for personal stuff.
Personally I just use Dark Reader though.
I looked at a few (3?) monkey extensions (including violentmokey). I don't remember the details but I think there were issues with all of them (probably privacy issues).
Dark Reader works great, I've used it for years on firefox
pure chromium with extensions and ungoogled chromium are alright
Nobody should use any browsers other than servo. But it's not ready yet 🤷♂️