Using Google Chrome as your preferred browser? Think again

If you use Google Chrome as your preferred browser, think again. A research paper by Precog IIIT-Delhi has found 218 Chrome browser extensions spying on people’s browsing history, IP address, geolocation, social media access token, and domains.

Consequences of Stealing User Information
- Browsing history, domain – Leakage of behavioural pattern, links to private documents on services like Pastebin, Google Docs
- Geolocation, IP address – Revealing home/work location, country specific advertising can be done by websites
- Online social media access tokens – Social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter etc can be compromised

Permissions which can Enable Spying
- Accessing user information – Tabs, cookies, storage, all URLs, history, geolocation, active tabs
- Storing user information – cookies, unlimited storage
- Sending user information – Web request

- Not many spying extensions are reported. Only 12 out of 218 extensions received negative comments about spying happening on Chrome Web Store
- Top developers also publish spying extensions. 2 out of the top 10 developers (by volume of extensions) have published spying extensions
- Using a neural-network model, based on permissions asked by extensions, client-side behaviour and meta-information of extensions, we achieve a precision of 86% to effectively detect spying extensions