Google recently decided to remove two extensions from the Chrome Web Store which were guilty of violating the company’s terms of service.
The two extensions – “Add to Feedly” and “Tweet This Page” with less than 100,000 users each were accused of including code that served people ads in a way that violated the search engine giant’s terms of service.
A number of Chrome users took this issue to the message boards this weekend to voice their concerns over the matter. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, one of the users classified Add to Feedly extension as spam causing ads to pop up suddenly on any website visited by the user.
Reports coming from two different websites forced Google to check the extensions. Though Google has imposed several policy based restrictions and terms of service for its Chrome Web Store extensions, including limits on the number and placement of ads, the search engine does not go on actively policing or screening these extensions once it has approved the extensions for inclusion in the Chrome Web Store. It allows silent updating of the extensions in background without actually reviewing the changes.
In both cases, the developers of the extensions sold them to another party that then silently updated them to include the offending code.
Last month Google updated its Chrome Web Store policy that called for extensions to have a single and easy to understand purpose as it was found that there were a number of extensions crowding the browser user interface and slowing down users’ browsing experience.
[Source: The Wall Street Journal, Ars Technica]
