stowawaywot

No, it is not necessary to shut down all extensions, you just need a better security model. Today, one click is sufficient to grant an extension unlimited access to all your request data (including form data) together with the ability to send that data anywhere. In addition, most of the problematic extensions try to trick the user by either not informing him/her at all about the data collection, or by misnoming it as anonymized collection of "usage statistics" (which is often a blatant lie).

Of course it's fine to argue that it's the users problem, but then I don't see why on one hand we're trying to harden browsers against all kinds of sophisticated attack vectors while at the same time giving malicious actors privileged access to all the users data via the App Store. And again, restricting the kind of access that an extension has to the users data would be a first step to amend the problem. Allowing users to report abuse in an effective way would be a second step. Being more strict with violators would be a third one, as today most extensions simply reapply for access after being deleted and often get included again (just wait and see, WOT will also make a reappearance).

I have seen the data the article talks about. For more than 99 % of the URLs, there was NO "cleaning" performed whatsoever, instead they just used the raw URL and made it thus accessible to anyone who bought the data. Some of these URLs included sensible session information, password reset tokens, e-mails or private links to content hosted on Dropbox / Google Calendar / Google Drive and similar web services.

Also, WOT is not the only extension doing this, the company behind it has hundreds of other extensions and mobile apps that perform the same kind of data collection, capturing several percent of the entire Web traffic in total (in Germany alone, almost 3 million people were spied upon using this technique).

Browser vendors really need to change their attitude towards extensions, as they basically allow users to install malware/spyware in their browsers without performing any real certification / auditing. At the very least there should be a way for users to see a full audit log of the information that an extension sends to remote servers, as this is usually already enough to tell if the extension is sending more data than it should.

Also, anonymization should NEVER be done on the remote end, but always at the source, as there is no way to guarantee that it will happen otherwise (as WOT proves).