Comment by acqq
9 years ago
It was obviously not complete in the form it was delivered, the "turning on" was supposed to be added somewhere at some later moment.
The whole thing is still suspicious: it was delivered to everybody whereas if it was supposed to be used only by the users who are aware of it, as now Mozilla tries to spin it, i.e. only to those who decided to "play the game", then the hidden install, especially to every user, was unnecessary as the normal extensions to Firefox are easily installed by the user, a click or two are enough:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-cat-fri...
The proof of the planned data collection, confirming my previous claims, found declared in the source of the extension itself:
"## Observed data
- Possible page view counts on SUMO
- Possible page view counts (with and without the special 'enrolled' header) on Partner pages."
I've also already explained the "special 'enrolled' header."
The turning on was obviously either planned for some special moment, which wasn't the moment of that the extension was actually delivered, or the extension was accidentally delivered in the unfinished state -- doesn't matter, it provably didn't get enough scrutiny, see my other comments here for the details, the damage it actually done is regarding "tracking" less than planned, but regarding annoyance of their users probably more.