Amid growing concern about a disregard for Chrome Web Store policies, Google is slapping a ban on extensions that mine for cryptocurrencies.
Amid growing concern about a disregard for Chrome Web Store policies, Google is slapping a ban on extensions that mine for cryptocurrencies.
With immediate effect, no more cryptomining extensions will be added to the Store, and as of July 2018, and existing mining tools will be removed. Google says that an astonishing 90 percent of mining extensions ignore rules that state cryptomining must be the extension’s sole purpose, and users need to be fully informed about the mining.
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The company explains that there has been a rise in the number of malicious extensions which purport to serve one function, but are secretly mining cryptocurrency in the background. As well as taking place without consent, Google says that this form of mining can « often consume significant CPU resources, and can severely impact system performance and power consumption. »
Writing on the Chromium blog, Extensions Platform Product Manager James Wagner explains:
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