I’ve noticed that dark reader on occasion phones home to darkreader.org, also with a increasing amount of sponsored links on their page. So what does everyone think, are they safe right now or should they not be trusted?

  • NixEnglish
    31•1 year ago

    The coder of Hover Zoom+ publishes all the offers he gets to sell his users data. Here’s an offer that mentions their partnership with Dark Reader:

    1/25/2021

    We’d love to have redacted sponsor Hover Zoom+ in a similar manner to how we’re partnering with Dark Reader. See attached for how that partnership has come to life, but we’re honestly super flexible on implementation. We’d essentially love to pay you in exchange for helping us drive users to redacted.

    https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

    Based on this it seems like Dark Reader has sold out to some type of partnership of some kind. If they did agree to start selling users data without informing their users would they even publish this code on their github? They could easily publish code that didn’t include the code in the extension to track their users.

    Im going to try emailing them and I think I’ll be looking for an alternative

    Edit: I went to their website to find an email to contact them and wow. I know they want people to download their app but this is excessive I cant dismiss this giant button to download the app and when I accidentally clicked it, it became wayy bigger and doesn’t hide

    Edit 2: they replied

    I’ve never heard about Hover Zoom. At the moment we only partner with Honey and DuckDuckGo, you can see their banners and install their products. We don’t collect any data. Best Regards, Redacted

    Follow up email:

    The dates reflect with Toucan, again, we had installation links to their app. Last year their product was shut down. Some time ago it was acquired by a bigger company.

    I then asked mentioned your concern about the extension periodically phoning home and they replied:

    The extension periodically checks if there are new blog posts on the website and displays the latest news in the News section https://darkreader.org/blog/ Best, Redacted

    Seems alright imo

    Edit 3: I’m actually confused by the email because it states their only partnered with Honey and Duckduckgo but they also have Adblockplus, icon8, Vpnwelt, and instinctools in their sponsored section?

    Edit 4: I asked why there were more links in the sponsored section than Honey and Duckduckgo and they replied

    It depends on your business structure. You need an agreement for advertising services, or some invoices, and pay taxes from your revenue. Open Collective acts as an intermediate, we don’t have agreements with those sponsors or any invoices, just decided to put their links on our website to attract more sponsors.

    Seems a little odd but overall understandable.