![]() Taking a step back, let's consider the bigger picture. ![]() Now, it is available again, but it's rated as experimental.Īfter this got publicized, Ant issued a rebuttal. ![]() ![]() Shortly thereafter, Mozilla removed the extension. When The Register article was written the Ant Video Downloader was available with no warning. My first question was, who or what is Ant? On their website, they go out of their way not to say who they are.Įvery computer user should be wary of accepting software from strangers. Part of Defensive Computing is knowing who to trust. This is beyond normal cookie or LSO tracking this is where the plugin itself is phoning home to ant.com every time I visit any website.Īt the ANT website they say "The source code is systematically reviewed by an independant Mozilla contributor before it is given to the public. This happens in regular browsing, browsing on your corporate VPN, Private browsing mode and browsing via proxies or anonymising services such as Tor, completely bypassing many layers of anonymity and security afforded by services such as proxies, Tor and corporate VPNs. this addon is in fact, contrary to their published privacy policy, clandestinely collecting data about every site that the addon users visit (not just ant.com or video sites) and specifically tying this back to you via a cookie and what appears to be a unique identifier, aka Ant-UID. He found that every time he went to a web page, either on the public Internet or on a private Intranet, his Firefox browser was contacting a computer named and sending it the name of the currently displayed web page. The secret tracking was discovered by Simon Newton who first wrote about it on May 10th. I ran across it in a May 20th article by Dan Goodin in The Register. Surprisingly, this got very little traction in the press.
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