Usage of the Awesome Screenshot browser extension requires granting it permission to capture anonymized click stream data.
Awesome screenshot chrome update#
If you check the description of the extension on the Chrome Web Store, you will notice the following update if you scroll down. It turned out, that the Chrome extension Awesome Screenshot fed the bot, named niki-bot, urls taken from the user's browsing history.Ī closer analysis by an affected user revealed that urls were sent over plaintext while others claimed that not only urls but also session data was captured by the extension. When webmasters noticed hits to specific pages by bots, pages that bots normally don't access because they are not public and many require authentication to be accessed, they started to investigate the matter. The whole thing came to light after a while. The company behind the product added a price comparison component to it which appeared to be the first attempt at monetization.Īfterwards, it added another monetization module to the extension. It was a screenshot taking extension for Chrome that you could use to capture part of or all of a page, add annotations, blur sensitive information and upload or share the screenshot afterwards. The extension is no longer available at the time of writing. It had more than 1.3 million users and 45,000 ratings with the average rating five of five on the Chrome Web Store.
The last two options usually come with some form of user tracking that companies add to the extension to create profiles for use in advertisement or to sell the data to other companies.Īwesome Screenshot was a very popular Chrome extension.
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