Cooperation with developers

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while (a very long while) you might remember that years ago I wrote a little Firefox extension called Make Link. It’s been an occasional source of both pride (download of the day on Lifehacker, featured in a video by popular internet hobo impersonator Merlin Mann) and shame (any time I look at the code). I haven’t worked on it in years, but I still get emails sometimes.

Here’s one from this morning:

Hello,

We are looking for cooperation with developers.

If your firefox chrome plugin has active users (daily). We’ll pay you by the amount of daily-active uers.

We need you to update the plugin and feedback the following information to our server:
1. User-agent (Like Mozilla 19.0 )
2. Language (Like English, French)
3. OS (User operation system, like Win7, Linux)
4. URLs (all typed urls in the browser by every user)
5. IP address (user IP address)

Looking to hear back from you.

As it happens, yes, Make Link does have daily active “uers”. About 16,000 of them apparently, with 30-40 new downloads daily. I wonder how many of those people would be happy with me recording their IP addresses and entire browsing history and selling that data? I’m guessing probably not many.