Each "page" in this multi-page article is literally 1 image, about 50 words of text, and 3 ads. The article content is fine, but there is no reason it has to be spread across 7 different pages. Publishers chasing pageview and ad impression counts make the web a shitty place.
It doesn't say that. It says it requires access to:
"
* Your data on all websites
* Your tabs and browsing history
"
The reason for the first is that it needs to be able to modify every page you are looking at to block the ads. The reason for the second is that it needs access to the Tab API (to get the name/URL of a webpage you view, presumably to make use of white/black lists.)
Which is a huge part of what makes various "privacy policy" terms so damned useless.
There is a ton of software on my computer that "has access" to my "data" and "network traffic": the kernel, network stack, clients, filesystem drivers, etc.
What they don't do is go tattling all this crap back to some mothership (or at least they'd better damned well not be).
Where Android / iPhone apps and Chrome extensions start freaking the living crap out of me is where they say they "require" this access ... and I don't (short of setting up some network traffic instrumentation) know off-hand whether this is staying local to the app or getting broadcast to the world. Or some big brotherly subset of the world.
My point is that what the extension requests access to is necessary for it to work, which you were disputing in your earlier message.
Sure you have to trust it, and you are generally right to be paranoid about Chrome extensions, but on the positive side, the extensions are somewhat more limited in the bad things they can do compared to non-sandboxed native desktop apps, and the source code is always available (although at times obfuscated and can be updated automatically) since they are written in JavaScript.
Well yes. That was exactly my point. Nobody should have to do that. On the tail end just because it's unnecessary tedium. On the fat end because it's hard to do.
