“Actors who are asking me to add some tracking code are mostly interested in reselling users’ data,” Anashkin said. “Actors who want to purchase it outright will stuff it with malware depending on their level of greed: hijacking affiliate links, tampering with search results, showing popups with shady websites, etc.”
Anashkin’s experience appears to be fairly common. Developers have discussed these solicitations in online forums and several have written blog posts about selling extensions or partnership offers.
I get these offers almost daily for my Chrome extension, and have done for years. I couldn’t do it to the users, but they wouldn’t be making the offers if some people weren’t accepting.
Exactly. I don’t get them as often as daily, but I have gotten a bunch. I just mark them as spam and move on with my life. Not only would I never sell my hard work to a shady company, but I’d also never willfully harm my user base. It’s like scam calls I suppose. To me, routine scam calls are blatantly obvious, but since I still get them so frequently, they must be fooling some people.