#Awesome screenshot extension in chrome software#

‘No Personally Identifiable Data’ĭiigo recently appended an updated privacy policy to the Chrome Web Store listing for this extension, which reads: Now, in fairness, Diigo is not doing anything novel in partnering with a third-party company in this manner. The ‘malware’ furore earlier in the year flagged up the extent of the problem, forcing Google to bring in new guidelines that add-ons hosted in the store have to abide by.īrowsing habits are expensive currency in the online marketplace.īut while extensions tracking your every online move for the benefit of advertisers is nothing new, something about the way niki-bot works is. Rather than simply log sites and move on, this bot is allegedly still returning to tracked websites (including those private, internal pages) for reasons, as of writing, yet unknown. If accurate, it’s likely that SimpleWeb pay Diigo to gather information on browsing habits, which they then subsequently sell or lease on to other companies for competition analysis purposes.

This data is shunted over to a third-party service at “lb.“, a domain believed to be a redirect/API wrapper for the third-party service SimilarWeb. Awesome Screenshot Not Quite So Awesome After Allįor all its usefulness the Awesome Screenshot tool is imbibed with an ulterior purpose: to track and send details of every page visited and search term entered by those with it installed. Virus scans showed up nothing on his computer,” he explains.Ī bit of further sleuthing quickly threw up the culprit: Diigo‘s innocuous sounding ‘Awesome Screenshot’ extension for Google Chrome. “We had all visited many of the, but one user in particular was likely to have visited all of them due to the nature of their role.

#Awesome screenshot extension in chrome software#

Since this was pinging the kind of internal infrastructure links that regular web crawlers don’t have access to, Jacq dug a bit deeper, uncovering some kind of ‘browsing tracking’ software that was running on an employee’s computer. The behaviour in this add-on came to light when Miguel Jacq noticed hits to private URLs on one of the servers he manages were being made by something announcing itself as ‘niki-bot’.

With more than 1.3 million users, Diigo’s ‘Awesome Screenshot’ Chrome extension is an undeniably popular utility - but is its usefulness a front for something more sinister?Īccording to an investigation conducted by Miguel Jacq, a Linux system administrator with more than 10 years of experience, it seems so.ĭespite the exuberant name Awesome Screenshot is doing something decidedly unawesome in the background: harvesting your browsing data.