On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 12:34:46PM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Adam Williamson <adamw...@fedoraproject.org> said:
> > As part of a tie-in with an American TV show, Mozilla thought it'd be a
> > great idea to silently install a cryptically-named addon in all(?)
> > Firefox deployments. Which can't be turned off.
> 
> I thought that this was actually a violation of the packaging policies,
> but I can't seem to find it now; I only see the restriction on software
> the requires downloads to be useful.  I think simply requiring Mozilla
> to change their policies is unacceptable, as this still depends on a
> third party to properly enforce such policies (and not have any security
> issue that could result in untrusted addons being installed).
>
> IMHO such behavior needs to be disabled by default in any packages
> shipped by Fedora for Fedora to remain a trustworthy distribution.  Are
> there any other packages that can silently download and run non-Fedora
> code?

It was brought up elsewhere that Chrome/Chromium in the past has done
something worse in scope, silently downloading an add-on to that turns
on & listens to your microphone. Ostensibly to detect the "ok google"
keyword, but since its a closed source add-on can you be sure that's all
it does...

 
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/

Fortunately, the Fedora builds of Chromium have explicitly disabled this
feature (enable_hotwording=false in chromium.spec)

Regards,
Daniel
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