Can someone use their words to explain the distaste for the addon that the downvotes on this and crossposted communities seem to represent? Is there something bad about the extension?
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
-5 points (33.3% liked)
Privacy
39130 readers
1044 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I edited my comment here, but the privacy concern with Chameleon stems from its ability to access and modify data on all websites. This access is necessary for the extension to function, as it needs to alter the user agent and other browser settings. Obviously not great when on secure websites.
Thank you for the clarification. Does having it open source and the source code being auditable help mitigate that risk at all or is there something that can still put you at risk of having your information misused from pages loaded with the extension installed?
Can someone explain why all the downvotes? I've always been of the opinion that the more plugins you have, the more identifiable you are, so if that is the reason for the downvotes, I'd understand.
Edit: It seems the extension requires access to all websites, which allows it to monitor and modify data from any visited site
I think there might be a bit of misunderstanding about what those permissions mean. The extensions just need to be able to "see" the contents of a web page in order to be able to hide ads, change font & background colors, edit URLs, or redirect resource requests. There is no other way for them to perform those functions unless they have permission to read the original data presented by websites you visit.
Point taken, I like the idea of the plugin but was just looking at the permissions and surmising that it was the reason for the downvotes.