An old and unmaintained add-on, "BlockSite", has been taken over by a new developer. The new developer has installed tracking software to "phone home" and report the user's browsing.
Reported as a bug, per add-on guidelines. Ref: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=903799 This got past AMO partly because the release notes for a new version did not emphasize the new tracking feature. The new developer, "wips.com", is in the user tracking business. Their pitch says: "Wips.com is the Web Information Company. We measure Internet activity in order to understand trends, help people discover new content, and help people make better online decisions. Millions of people download Wips.com software ("Wips.com Extensions, extensions and add-ons" or "Extension service") to help measure the web." "When you use the Extension Service, we collect information about the websites you visit, the searches you perform using search engines and when you use the "search" function of the Extension Service, the ways in which you use various Extension Service features (including whether the Extension Service is still installed on your computer), and the pages you view." The Mozilla add-on page for BlockSite ("https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/";) doesn't even have a privacy policy. There are other "wips.com" add-ons that now need to be checked. Worse, they offer development tools for building add-ons which build in their "tracking" features. So there may be Mozilla add-ons with their tracking code that aren't labelled as being from "wips.com". Once the tracking code has been identified, all add-ons need to be checked for it. John Nagle _______________________________________________ dev-security mailing list dev-security@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security
