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giarctoday at 2:12 PM1 replyview on HN

My daughter, in grade school, uses a Chromebook at school and access Google Classroom through Chrome. The school has very few restrictions on extensions and when I log into her account, Chrome is littered with extensions. They all innocuous (ex. change cursor into cat, pets play around on your screen etc). However, without fail, each time I log in and go to the extension page, Chrome notifies me that one or more of the extensions was removed due to malicious activity or whatever.


Replies

Imustaskforhelptoday at 2:39 PM

I don't think that your daughter might know if say any web cam might take photos and see what she's searching if the extensions are indeed malicious.

I'd either go ahead and talk to her and remove extensions altogether and ask her to have a stock/only open source extensions (yes opensource also has supply issues but its infinitely more managable than this) or the second option being to maybe create them yourself . I don't know about how chrome works (I use firefox) but one thing that you can do is if the thing is simple for your daughter, then just vibe code it and use tampermonkey (heck even open source it) and then audit the code written by it yourself if you want better security concerns.

Nowadays I really just end up creating my own extensions with tampermonkey before using any proprietory extension. With tampermonkey, the cycle actually feels really simple (click edit paste etc.) and even a single glance at code can show any security errors for basic stuff and its one of the few use cases of (AI?) in my opinion.