Remove Stylish extension - it steals your data

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The extension was bought by the well-known company SimilarWeb in 2017 and since then, users have been transferring their data to it.

The popular Stylish extension for customizing the interface of sites turned out to be not as conscientious as we would like. Developer Robert Heaton posted the "Stylish" browser extension steals all your internet history on his blog for comprehensive information on how Stylish steals user data.

As it turned out, an extension with an audience of more than 2 million users transfers user data to SimilarWeb. Its services are used by many developers and large corporations who need web analytics. The fact is that until 2016 Stylish remained an independent extension, and its development was carried out by the original developer. In 2017, Stylish became the property of SimilarWeb, which has incorporated its analytics tools into the extension.

Almost the entire history of visits in the browser in which the Stylish extension is installed falls into the hands of the company. Yes, SimilarWeb knows which social media profiles you followed, and also has access to private links from emails with unique keys. Leakage of such information is not just undesirable, but dangerous for the user.

Interestingly, SimilarWeb is not that bad, as they told Announcement to the Community that they were introducing analytics back when they bought it in 2017. Of course, no one paid attention to this. In general, you can do without removing the extension - just turn off analytics in its settings.