The leaky extensions in question, like “Web of Trust”, phone home with browsing data, and say that they do. The extensions I use either just plain don’t do that, or have an option to turn off such feedback. It’s just one more detail that an eye has to be kept on.
The obvious way is usually enough: check through the addon’s settings to see if there’s an option to disable it. Eg, under Ghostery’s hamburger-menu is a ‘Support Ghostery’ setting section, with three different boxes for enabling or disabling phone-home behaviour. Besides that, you can glance at the user reviews on the Mozilla add-on download page, on Reddit, the top few Google results, and so on. It also helps to be careful about where you look for privacy addon suggestions in the first place.
The leaky extensions in question, like “Web of Trust”, phone home with browsing data, and say that they do. The extensions I use either just plain don’t do that, or have an option to turn off such feedback. It’s just one more detail that an eye has to be kept on.
How do you know whether an extension such as Adblock Plus or uBlock phones back?
The obvious way is usually enough: check through the addon’s settings to see if there’s an option to disable it. Eg, under Ghostery’s hamburger-menu is a ‘Support Ghostery’ setting section, with three different boxes for enabling or disabling phone-home behaviour. Besides that, you can glance at the user reviews on the Mozilla add-on download page, on Reddit, the top few Google results, and so on. It also helps to be careful about where you look for privacy addon suggestions in the first place.