One such extension was found to have exposed the personal data and browsing history of as many as nine million users by inserting extra scripts into the code. (“Don’t be evil” has been dropped by Google as a mantra). Some Chrome extensions, however, are genuinely evil. Just ask Vocativ: On the same day that Fusion released their Chrome extension, a Vocativ senior editor who forgot to uninstall it had a moment of very vocal panic in the newsroom, as a prominent headline appeared to contain Donald “INSERT RIDICULOUS QUOTE” Trump, emblazoned across Vocativ’s homepage. It’s mostly when journalists forget about the extensions that things get embarrassing. Tiny Hands and Trumpweb are just a sample of a number of Trump-related extensions, most of which replace “Donald Trump” with something else, or simply erase him from webpages altogether. None of these extensions are meant to be malevolent or cause pain to those who download and install them.
And they weren’t alone.įorgetting, then remembering that I installed Chrome extension is the highlight of my day. Forgetting that you’ve installed extensions like this, however, can wreak havoc, as Wired showed this week.
His Trumpweb extension, which inserts a randomized Trump quote in between the words “Donald” and “Trump” wherever they appear, was genuinely hilarious for the 15 minutes after installation, after which most right-thinking people probably uninstalled and moved on with their lives. Sinker follows in the footsteps of Fusion’s Patrick Hogan, who was similarly inspired to do editorial evil by Donald Trump. He’s also someone who enjoyed Wednesday immensely, if his Twitter account is anything to go by.įun, anarchic Chrome extensions that screw with how you see the web are nothing new. The “Someone With Tiny Hands” extension was created by Dan Sinker, an editorial technologist who heads the Knight-Mozilla open news project and is the clever soul behind the hilarious Twitter account. You can also create and submit extensions to the Chrome Web Store, which is like an app store for your browser. So, uh, be careful with chrome extensions, journalists everywhere /JUpnjYiAesįor the unaware, Chrome extensions are lightweight plug-ins for Google’s Chrome web browser, which anyone can download, mostly for free. The culprit? A rogue Google Chrome extension. In one of the greatest corrections of the web publishing era, Wired magazine on Wednesday amended an article to acknowledge that Donald Trump’s name was accidentally replaced with the phrase “Someone With Tiny Hands” throughout one of their pieces.
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