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Popular Steam Extension 'Inventory Helper' Spies On Users, Says Report (windowsreport.com)
SmartAboutThings shares a report from Windows Report: If you installed the "Steam Inventory Helper" on your computer, you may want to uninstall it as soon as possible. Recent reports suggest that this extension used to buy and sell digital goods on Steam is spying on its users. Redditor Wartab made a thorough analysis of the tool and reached the following conclusions: The spyware code tracks your every move starting from the moment you visit a website until you leave. It also tracks where you are coming from on the site; Steam Inventory Helper tracks your clicks, including when you are moving your mouse and when you are having focus in an input; When you click a link, it sends the link URL to a background script; Fortunately, the code does not monitor what you type. Apparently, the purpose of this spyware is to collect data about gamers for promotional purposes.
Source code doesn't help unless you have a surefire way to guarantee that the binary you're running was built exactly from that source code. And if the binary has dependencies on other libraries then the same applies to them. And the compiler toolchain. And if the binary executes html content or scripts, potentially fetched from the web then even that doesn't prevent potential abuse.