According to research by professors from the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, many browser extensions can make data of users vulnerable. Most users use browser extensions for different purposes like managing their passwords, fixing grammar, finding shopping deals and translating web pages.
Even though there are thousands of advantages of browser extensions, they do not come without risks. The research says that these browser extensions are a risk to user privacy and many of these extensions extract user data without their permission and use them for different purposes. Frank Li, the lead researcher, says that we already know that browser extensions can access web history and searches of users, but this new research is done to find out whether browser extensions can also access sensitive information like emails, passwords, social media accounts and bank information.
The team of researchers designed Arcanum, a web framework, to test their suspicions about browser extensions accessing user data. The researchers studied more than 100,000 browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store. It was found that nearly 3000 browser extensions can access private data of users, and more than 200 browser extensions took private user data directly and posted it on different servers.
Some browser extensions also take user data for acceptable reasons, for instance, to improve the browser’s functionality so we cannot say whether a browser extension is taking user data for the right purposes or not. To know about this, researchers took some browser extensions and tried to match their privacy policies with their data collection activities. This way they could determine which browser extensions are legitimately taking user data and which ones are not.
Most of the browser extensions were found to have no proper data protection policies. This suggests that web browsers like Google should take a stricter privacy approach when it comes to browser extensions. Users shouldn’t be worried about their data and privacy when it comes to browser extensions and only new policies can help them protect their data.
Image: DIW-Aigen
Read next: Apple Returns To Its Top Spot In America’s Customer Satisfaction Index
