Two days ago, I updated a handful of my Chrome extensions without thinking much of it. Then, yesterday, I noticed an in-text ad on a Reddit comment I had posted. Surely, I didn't add it, so something else must have. I hovered over the link, which conveniently informed me that this advertisement was being provided by a service called "Skimlinks."
A quick Google search for Skimlinks and Chrome Extensions proved no help, so I systematically went down my Extensions list and unchecked the box for each one while visiting a Wikipedia article that now included one of these in-text links. The culprit was Facebook One.
Facebook One is an extension that lets you know when someone has posted an important update or message to you on Facebook. I hadn't been really enthusiastic since I got it. The notification counter would pop up, but it frequently would not reset after I visited the site, which made new notifications confusing. When I saw that the extension was updating the other day, I had hoped that they were upgrading the feature. To some extent, the upgrade did improve the count reset, but it seems that they also decided to sneak in Skimlinks without letting us know and without giving us the option to disable it.
If they had included the option, I may have kept Facebook One activated on my browser, but since they did not give me that choice, it looks like I will be disabling Facebook One altogether.
No comments:
Post a Comment