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Comment by deltaprotocol | Hacker News Reader

There is also another reason to use this over an extension: privacy. Last I saw the browser extensions worked automatically for all pages, thus sending all your browsing habits to some random place. Quite serious if you ask me.

That said, they may have changed or I may have missed extensions that aren't pervasive.

Awesome work! Thanks!

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> Last I saw the browser extensions worked automatically for all pages, thus sending all your browsing habits to some random place

You're right that when a extension want to work when the current tab and site you have in focus, they'll need to ask for permission to all websites (otherwise the developer would have to whitelist all the websites where the extension should work) but that doesn't mean that they are sending your browser habits anywhere. Although they could, so review the source code if possible.

Most extensions do work that way, but if privacy or resource-draining background processes are a concern you should check out sitestacks.com - the crawl is only run on command and from the SiteStacks servers.

It's a wrapper over wappalyzer which is a chrome extension, why would this avoid sending your data to wappalyzer servers?

Presumably it does the same thing, sure, but isn't active on every page you visit, only those you drop into a shell and run it against. So it gives you the same sort of results without having to enable and disable the extension in the browser.

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