Once again daddy Google being an absolute asshole against projects that can damage their tracking practices.
Meanwhile you can download the extension from their GitHub or use Tracking Token Stripper if you need to use Chromium-based browsers, or. you know… just use Firefox.
Whoa that’s messed up, I have this installed on FF. I wonder why they would go after this and not ublock origin first, if the goal is to ban these type plugins.
uBlock is too widespread and well-known at this point, they do this to smaller projects because they can and they know that it won’t cause as much of a pushback from the general public.
They tried to kill the API uBlock uses some time ago And banned AdNauseam. I think uBlock is just too big and popular to be directly banned.
I’m sure you’re onto something, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “this type of plugins”.
From what I gather, UBlock is problematic to Google because it blocks Google Ads. And that’s a bit different to what ClearURLs do. The reason ClearURLs is problematic to Google is because of the ‘amp’ links, which are links that make it possible for Google to track those who click them.
So yeah, I guess both piss off Google, but in different ways: one makes it harder to extract data from you, their product (since your data constructs an amazing model, to which companies bid access to when purchasing ads), while the other blocks the delivery of the ads.
Slow and steady is a better practice than going for the big ones outright.
People are not predictable and they need to be sure this wont affect their business by creating a trend. On second thought it is a bit surprising that no tiktok trend has exploded where they instruct people to block ads with uBlock.
These kinds of mistakes happen all the time, and they’re super frustrating. Google probably should have asked nicely for the dev to make changes to ClearURLs, but assuming the translation is accurate, the author of the addon also exaggerated a bit when he cited “having a description too detailed that can potentially confuse users” and said “I think that ClearURLs now has so many users that it is unwelcome for Google and they would like to see the addon disappear permanently.”
Google’s complaints in English are below:
Violations:
Inaccurate description - Missing information:
Violation: The description of the item does not mention the following feature: “Donate, Badges, Logging, Export/Import”.
Here’s how to fix the issue: Update the description of the article to mention all the features, or remove the corresponding source code from the package
Permission Usage:
Violation: Requiring the following permissions is not required for the methods/properties implemented by the article: clipboardWrite
How to fix the issue: Remove the permissions listed above. The properties used by the articles will work even if these permissions are not requested.
Keyword spam:
Violation: superfluous and/or irrelevant keywords are in the description of the article Policy Violating Content: “Irreverent information about ClearURLs”.
Here’s how to fix the problem: Remove superfluous and/or irrelevant keywords.
The author of ClearURLs says Google is wrong about the clipboardWrite permission, and that the other violations are just nit-picking. It’s definitely a little ridiculous that the addon was pulled from the store for this stuff, but I’m sure there will be several emails back and forth, a few lines edited in the addon’s description, and then ClearURLs will be relisted in the Chrome Web Store. I don’t think this really justifies jumping to the conclusion that Google is taking a politically motivated action against a small dev, it’s more likely some over-eager intern stuck with the job of auditing chrome apps jumped the gun and over reacted.
Yeah, it was a bit exaggerated by the dev, now that I can see what it says, but still, saying that the names of the contributors are keyword spam while “needing” to warn users of the buttons the add-on has is still stupid.
Mozilla doesn’t do a lot to garner praise these days, but times like this just make me appreciate them for the simple things.
So that’s the excuse they’re using now? I recall seeing this exact same reason for other privacy-focused apps and stuff being removed by doogle
Cool, one more plugin to add to my FF :)
🦊
I’ll stick to using Firefox still
