Why the expansive permissions?

lxieyang / vertical-tabs-chrome-extension

A chrome extension that presents your tabs vertically. Problem solved.

MIT License

466 stars 103 forks source link

Why the expansive permissions? #9

Closed rswerve closed 5 years ago

rswerve commented 5 years ago

This looks great, but why does it need access to more than the user's browsing history?

lxieyang commented 5 years ago

Hi, @rswerve! Thanks!

Do you mean the permissions listed in the manifest.json? Here's a brief description of each:

chrome://favicon/: this is to get all the website's favicons so that we can display them in the front of each tab
tabs and activeTab give access to the tabs and the related operations, such as closing, opening, reordering, highlighting, etc.
storage is mainly used to sync settings, such as the position of the sidebar, the width of the sidebar, etc.

Hope this helps! Thanks again for the interest!

rswerve commented 5 years ago

This is the linked privacy policy: https://github.com/lxieyang/lxieyang.github.io/wiki/KAP-Chrome-Extension-Privacy-Policy.

lxieyang commented 5 years ago

Oh, right! That should be taken out. I'll figure out a way to do it in the next iterations.

Basically, that's for another extension I developed for my research in HCI + programming. But somehow the chrome store will attach that same privacy policy to everything I publish. I'm not sure if it's by design or it's a bug, but I'll definitely try to sort it out.

Essentially, the permissions that this extension requires are listed in the reply above. Rest assured that it does not collect any other information or transmit them to anywhere else.

Again, thanks for letting me of this issue! I'll do my best to sort it out.

rswerve commented 5 years ago

Cool, thanks.