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Firefox and Chrome Pull Popular Browser Extension Stylish From Their Stores After Report Claimed It Logs and Shares Browsing History, Credentials
sombragris writes: Stylish, a popular extension available for Chrome and Firefox which allows for easy customization of any website, now phones home and shares its users' browser history with its corporate parent, according to blogger Robert Heaton. This prompted Firefox to ban the extension from its addons site and prompt all users to disable it. The discussion can be seen in the relevant bug report. In Heaton's words:
Stylish is no longer a well-meaning product with your best interests at heart. If you use and like Stylish, please uninstall it and switch to an alternative like Stylus, an offshoot from the good old version of Stylish that works in much the same way, minus the spyware.
Google too has pulled the extension from its extension store. This is not the first time Stylish is at the centre of a privacy debacle
We now live in "The Internet Economy" where everything is based on "monetizing" the customer.
Extentions need to be protected. We need to have a last known good backup system in place for extentions at risk of being hijacked.
The title suggests that not just browsing history but credentials are uploaded. The latter is potentially much worse than the former. Does anyone have verifiable data on exactly what was uploaded? Does everyone who got caught out by this need to reset their IDs/passwords/whatever on every site they visited while using the extension? Or every site they've ever visited and allowed their browser to store login credentials?
The new owners could be in pretty deep brown stuff anyway given that this sort of behaviour without explicit consent is now very illegal throughout Europe, but if they were stealing credentials then it would be prudent to reset everything, which of course could mean dozens or hundreds of different sites for some people.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is a plague in the modern tech industry, where everything from browser extensions to microlibraries for your favourite programming language is written by someone you've never met, supplied via some sort of centralised repository or distribution channel that you trust instead, and then winds up on your machine doing who-knows-what because that trusted distribution mechanism missed something, or even because the trusted developer of some code you're running, which you downloaded via a trusted source, itself trusted someone else unwisely.
The solution to this isn't just proper validation of where the code you're downloading actually came from, it's also to have security models more sophisticated than the 1980s in the Internet age. For example, why the hell could a browser extension that was there to modify the appearance of pages you were visiting suddenly choose to upload anything to the mothership without requiring additional permissions?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I was using stylish for quite some-time. I'm disappointed that this kind of breaking of trust occurred with that extension. I've now switched over to stylus instead. It works great (even better than stylish). It seems to behave better, have a better UI, and more stability. So, if you're unsure what to use, definitely give stylus a try.
the real blame lies squarely with the FF devs.
Wrong.
On what fscking planet is there justification for ALLOWING an extension to access history in the first place?!
For examples, try searching for Firefox extensions involving history.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of permissions system for extensions so that the user is prompted to grant access to things like history, credentials, form fields, user key-strokes, etc. Until there is, understand that you need to trust your extensions just as much as you have to trust the browser itself. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
People are concerned with the Cambridge Analytica stuff, where an app scrapes essentially publically-made data of users, but browser extensions are far scarier. If granted the right permissions, they have free reign on scraping password data. I imagine far more extensions are doing it.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of permissions system for extensions so that the user is prompted to grant access to things like history, credentials, form fields, user key-strokes, etc.
There is. That's part of the new extension system. The concept of permissions is fundamentally at odds with the old extensions system and was one of reasons for the new extension system.
Unfortunately, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there's no way to implement Stylish such that it doesn't have the rights to leak every URL you visit, since it can just add extra CSS that sends that information back via loading an image on its remote server. Of course, uMatrix or similar could block such a thing, but that's definitely a tool for advanced users.