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Mozilla Removes 23 Firefox Add-Ons That Snooped on Users
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Mozilla removed today 23 Firefox add-ons that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer has told Bleeping Computer today.
The list of blocked add-ons includes "Web Security," a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, which was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users' browsing histories to a server located in Germany.
At the time, Mozilla engineers said they would review the add-on's behavior. But following the initial report, several users reported other add-ons exhibiting similar data collection patterns, some of which sent data to the same server where "Web Security" was also sending information.
Mozilla Removes 23 Firefox Add-Ons That Snooped on Users.
Mozilla-endorsed security plug-in accused of tracking users • The Register:
El Reg reached out to Creative Software Solutions, whose managing director Fabian Simon says that the collection of browsing information is only done to check a site against Web Security's global blacklist.
"This is a necessary step to assure the functionality of the add-on and has nothing to do with tracking the users browser behavior, thus these reports only showed a part of how the add-on works to protect the user," Simon explained.
"We take privacy very important and do not use this server communication for tracking the users browsing history."