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Comment by cbsks | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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

In this case yes, it sounds like the pessimistic viewpoint may be the right one. However, for a while now HN has been going downhill with armchair analysis that inevitably concludes that any action taken by a business is wrong/harmful/bad, so I am thankful you took the time to be thoughtful before reacting.

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.

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

That's one of the nefarious reasons, not one of the optimistic ones.

Avast has its own browser, maybe they wanted to implement this feature natively in the browser and figured it would just be easier to acquire an already working solution.

There's no utility in trying to steel-man the actions of a known bad actor. Avast is a malware company. Would you try to guess at the optimistic reasons a gangster like Al Capone has for buying all the businesses in your neighborhood?

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