Google has reportedly removed two add-ons from its Google Chrome Web browser store after the extensions were found to be serving adware to its users. The company removed the "Add to Feedly" and "Tweet This Page" extensions on Sunday after the Wall Street Journal contacted the company about widespread users complaints.
Customers said both programs suddenly began serving link-embedded ads and pop-ups all over any websites visited - which reportedly happened after the developers sold the extensions to newer owners.
Google allows third-party developers to create extensions for its browser. Selling extensions is perfectly fine under Google's rules, but it's a transaction that went wrong in the case of Feedly and Tweet extensions according to NBC News. The add-ons took advantage of the fact that users can choose to update the extensions automatically so users aren't alerted to changes in the programs they have downloaded. In the case of these two extensions, the new owners added the type of invasive ads that violate Google's terms of service without anyone noticing.
Amit Agarwal, a developer and tech columnist who created the Add to Feedly extension for the Feedly RSS reader, blogged about his experience last week in a post titled "I Sold a Chrome Extension but it was a bad decision." In the post, he explains that he received an e-mail from someone offering him four figures for something that had taken about an hour to create. He then agreed to sell Add to Feedly and one month later the new owner pushed through an adware update to the extension that has caused all of the problems.
According to ComputerWorld, the Tweet This Page extension shares a similar story. NBC News reports that at least one developer is taking advantage of the holes left behind by the extensions being removed by Google. An entirely new extension called "Add to Feedly" has been developed by Marcos Besteiro in which he promises no extra adware software on the new version of the extension, which does the same thing as the previous one.
