Extensions purchased, trackware added

[LoudNoise]

A organization is purchasing extensions and adding stuff to userconfig to make these extensions a slightly-problemsome-to-opt-out-from form of trackware. They are using the old "Web Information Company" dodge and promise not to use any of the personally identifiable data the collect. Naturally, they cannot say the same for the folks they sell this data to.

As far as I can tell, the only thing they add to the new version of the extension is the stuff that allows tracking. Also, since they don't post (as of this writing) a privacy policy at AMO for their extensions they can change it any time.

Purchasing extensions is a fairly interesting idea. It makes it easy to surf on the goodwill the extension has, likely makes the extension author extremely happy and is easy to abandon once it the goodwill/ease of update vanish. It looks like all they have to do is add the tracking stuff to about:config. I sincerely doubt that the extension.companyName stuff adds any functionality to the extension.

It should be interesting to see how long it takes for AMO respond to this.

Thanks to the folks in this thread viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2737553 for bring the subject up. Note that the OP is most likely wrong. It isn't likely it was a stealth installation. It is likely that the he had BlockList already installed, had forgotten about it and was surprised when the web page came up.

[Nagle]

A organization is purchasing extensions and adding stuff to userconfig to make these extensions a slightly-problemsome-to-opt-out-from form of trackware.

It should be interesting to see how long it takes for AMO respond to this.

They already have. It's OK with them. See:
"https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=903799"

[LoudNoise]

Locking since viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2737553 seems to have all of the traction. Please continue there.