A Precautionary Measure?
This was reported by Simeon Vincent, Extensions Developer Advocate of Google in the forum. He revealed that Chrome’s Web Store team has detected a rise in fraudulent transactions caused by commercial extensions earlier this month, and as a precautionary measure, the firm’s suspending new installations and updates of such extensions! Last year, Google’s Project Strobe tightened the extensions policies to take only relevant permissions and to publish their privacy policies on how they’d handle user data. This made few malicious extensions to wash off and most of them switching to ask only what needed. Commercial extensions as the ones which needed to be purchased before installing, one-time in-app purchases, monthly subscription models are under effect now. These are still functional for those who’re currently using, but the makers of such are barred from pushing updates and additional features. It’s unclear how long this ban lasts, as Simeon said, “We do not have a resolution timeline at the moment.” Finally, this announcement is just to be considered as a proactive measure for stopping future exploitations. Google said that those developers who got rejected with their new applications to make changes and resubmit for approvals.
