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Why do APPS have to have permissions to read and MODIFY browser history??

  • 6 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Why would an App MODIFY your browser history?? What purpose does an app have to operate by accessing your browser history? What kind of modification to browser history: Adding, or removing?? Sounds dark-sided to me.

Why would an App MODIFY your browser history?? What purpose does an app have to operate by accessing your browser history? What kind of modification to browser history: Adding, or removing?? Sounds dark-sided to me.

All Replies (6)

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Hi

Have you an example of an add-on that is doing this?

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Seburo- Hi Just try for yourself- there are so many. I looked for a YT video downloader, and read the list of permissions: read, and MODIFY browser history, among others. My question was: why would an extension have to modify your browser history to function? And what will these extensions do with the data it can read, and WRITE, on your PC??

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Example from New Tab I would think less than Google in any 5min period.

From time to time, we would like to collect usage data from New Tab Tools users, for the purposes of improving the software. No data will be collected if you do not opt in. No data for purposes other than improving New Tab Tools will be collected.

New Tab Tools will not collect any information that identifies you, or directly identifies the websites you visit. If web addresses are collected by New Tab Tools (currently there are no plans to do so), they will be anonymized (by hashing the URL), although it may be possible to indirectly identify some websites, due to their popularity.

Data collected will not be sold or given away to a third party. It is very unlikely that any data would be useful to a third party anyway. A broad summary of the data collected might be published, for example on the developer's blog.

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Pkshadow- I hear ya! But....do you ask for permission to MODIFY anything? Like Browser History? And WHY would you do that?

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Volunteer Support Contributors are not given that information.

Suggest you ask the Developer of the Extension from their contact or Support page. Possibly functionality or gaining what was taken away from them when changed the code format so they do not now have access to the guts of Firefox.


Please let us know if this solved your issue or if need further assistance.

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There are only a few coarse permissions and if a WebExtension needs to access the (tab) history then you see this specific permission. This doesn't necessarily mean that the extension will modify the history. Some extensions have a FAQ page that explains the permissions that the extension needs.