I can think of lots of nefarious reasons why a company would buy a browser extension, but I’m having a hard time thinking of a a potential good outcome of this. If we put on our optimism hats, why would Avast buy an extension? What benefit could they possibly get from it?

Edit: Maybe it is just a talent acquisition?

Browser extensions were main data source for their analytics subsidiary Jumpshot [1], which was shutdown for privacy reasons. Before that, when Mozilla and Opera started asking about their extensions, they rather removed them [2].

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-sells...

[2]: https://palant.info/2019/12/03/mozilla-removes-avast-extensi...

cbsks

That’s troubling. My optimism hat is starting to look silly…

dylan604

whenever it comes to web/data/privacy, default should be to not trust anyone, block all requests, deny deny deny. if and only if a company can prove they can be trusted, then on a compay-by-company/site-by-site basis should they be allowed to do things. that should be a very steep hill to climb.

blanket optimism sounds like a nice lifestyle of the young, but with age comes realization the world only takes advantage and wisdom leads to being more pessimistic. question everything including authority is how i was raised.

cbsks

It’s too early to make any definitive judgements on the future of this extension. There are many obvious ways that this acquisition could—and let’s be honest, probably will—go badly for the end user. I was hoping that someone could come up with a plausible optimistic outcome.

We will know definitively when the next updates to the extension comes out. Until then we are all just speculating.

That being said, the security consciousness user should probably switch to a pre-acquisition fork such as https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Dont-Care-About-Cookies