287 Chrome Extensions Caught Harvesting Browsing Data from 37M Users

A researcher (Q Continuum) uncovered 287 Chrome extensions that harvest and exfiltrate users' full browsing histories—affecting an estimated 37.4 million installations—by sending URLs and user identifiers (sometimes obfuscated or encrypted) to analytics firms and data brokers (e.g., Similarweb, Alibaba, ByteDance, Semrush) and many unidentified collectors; the team detected the activity using a man-in-the-middle proxy, Docker honeypots and regression models, concluding this is a large-scale privacy-harvesting operation with significant risks to individuals and organizations.