QuickDrag

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

by tne on Sept. 19, 2013 · permalink

Following this report: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quickdrag/reviews/344023/>, I checked the code and found a fantastic comment:

//Advertising is disabled for a one week period if that period has elapsed reset the marketing setting

And indeed the code does just that.

The option is also not documented at all, so no user can make an educated choice about whether to enable it or not. Nobody can know if or what data is sent, why, and to whom without looking at the code or network traffic. Without digging too much, I believe it modifies pages on certain sites (Yahoo and Youtube) to add undesired advertisement from iicdn.com. It also generates and stores a UUID for the user, which it only sends on first run to their server, supposedly to track how many unique users have the option enabled.

Note that as of september 2013, their website (http://www.quickdrag.com/) seems down, but looking at data from archive.org, it seems as though the server behind this domain always redirected to its Mozilla's addon page. No luck there. The author's website at <http://code.kliu.org/> provides no information either.

It's also an "opt-out" scheme (if we ignore the fact that they don't respect it for more than a week), where I believe it really should be opt-in. At the very least, users should be offered a choice before enabling the feature after installation.

In my opinion, this is a very lame tactic (it's almost malware at this point), and Mozilla should take ten minutes to review the code, and either force the developers to make changes or simply ban the add-on. It's a very small extension (albeit very useful), so I wouldn't worry too much: somebody will reimplement it better.