Remove special "tabs" permission from manifest and reconsider the inclusion of Google Analytics

[dalgard]

The "tabs" permission is no longer necessary, as long as you don't need the specific urls of tabs, among other things.

Please remove this permission from the manifest as soon as possible, so your extension can be installed completely without any worries about potential privacy violations in this or future versions. It's awesome that you link this extension directly to GitHub – I wish everyone would follow your example in this respect. With this tiny adjustment, noone in the future would need to spend time checking through your code, just to make sure that everything is above board – which, of course, it totally is 🙂

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Additionally – as have been argued by plenty of people – there's simply no place for Google Analytics inside a browser extension. I understand that GA is standard for most web development, but when it comes to the private browser behavior that any single individual chooses to install on their local machine, any kind of uploaded data should be specifically declarered and accepted by the user before any cloud data collection 🙏

[dalgard]

Additionally – as have been argued by plenty of people – there's simply no place for Google Analytics inside a browser extension.

Concretely, the standard should be something like this: https://github.com/stefanXO/Tab-Manager-Plus/blob/master/PRIVACY.md

[0xdevalias]

Additionally – as have been argued by plenty of people – there's simply no place for Google Analytics inside a browser extension.

Partially related:

• https://developer.chrome.com/blog/cws-analytics-revamp/

@dalgard I definitely see your point, and agree with your concerns. This was a quick chrome extension I hacked together for myself back in 2013, and it's only been very minimally updated since (last update was in 2018).

I can't remember my exact motivations, but I think I added Google Analytics so that I could see if/how often the extension was being used, and which features within the extension are being used; with the goal/theory to be understanding what parts are useful, and what parts aren't.

While I haven't exactly done much development/refinement on this extension making use of that, it's a feature I still value having. I'm not particularly wed to using Google Analytics for any reason other than that's what I was familiar with at the time. If there are alternative/better privacy preserving options these days, that would still allow me to track (anonymised) usage + which parts of the extension are used, I would definitely be open to hearing more about them.

I'm also open to adding this analytics as a configurable option, though right now it's more effort than I have time/energy to spend on this extension. There is currently no options page, so I would need to build that in first (see #5). At some point 'soonish' i'll need to update the extension for Manifest v3 (see #13), which I think might restrict/remove the ability for GA to work anyway; but at least at that point, I might have the focus/bandwidth to implement the options page/etc.

A few references for future me:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70908984/add-google-analytics-into-a-chrome-extension-using-manifest-v3
  • https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4
• https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-add-google-analytics-with-manifest-v3-468f1750dc
• https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/tut_analytics/

  • Caution: This page was migrated directly from the Manifest V2 documentation set. It has not yet been validated for compliance with Manifest V3.