this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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How to check that an add-on doesn't spy on you ? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Many add-ons have somewhat spookiy authorisation requirements, such as "access all of your activity". In many cases this is justified by it's function, and of course there isn't any problem with it as long as we're sure all this data stays on your computer and isn't shared with any remote server. How are we sure of that tho? Is there an easy way to check for each add-on ?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can make rules network-wide, per-app, or per-incident. The latter is useful for getting a handle on app behavior. Like if you see it contacting 'updates.somedev.com' weekly, you can choose to allow or disallow permanently based on how benign you think the app is. But more likely, anything trying to phone home has a dozen CDNs it's trying to hit rather than an easily identifiable URL. Block one, it tries to hit the other. Maybe today, maybe next week. It gets overwhelming (which IMO is a feature for the dev, not a bug).

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thats cool