Facebook has filed a lawsuit against the developers of a series of Google Chrome extensions. According to Facebook, these extensions scraped personal data from users' Facebook profiles.
Malicious Chrome Extensions Target Facebook Users
In a post on the Facebook Newsroom, Facebook announced that it's suing two Portugual-based developers for unknowingly collecting data from Facebook users. Facebook said that this is in violation of its Terms of Service and Portugal's Database Protection Law.
The developers went by the name of Oink and Stuff, and posted their malicious extensions on the Chrome store. The extensions in question are called, Web for Instagram Plus DM, Blue Messenger, Emoji Keyboard, and Green Messenger. If you have any of these installed, it goes without saying that you should uninstall them immediately.
All of these malicious extensions came with a privacy policy that claimed that the extensions didn't collect any personal data—this turned out to be a complete lie. Upon visiting Facebook, the extensions would collect information about the user's name, gender, relationship status, age, user ID, and more.
Facebook noted that "when people installed these extensions on their browsers, they were installing concealed code designed to scrape their information from the Facebook website, but also information from the users’ browsers unrelated to Facebook."
Keeping Your Personal Information Safe
Facebook might've taken action on these data-scraping extensions, but that still doesn't save you Facebook's data-hungry grips. Facebook knows a lot of information about its users, which is why it might be best to delete your account altogether.