(Archived) QUESTION: Privacy and clipper

[RobM 0]

I'd love to use Web Clipper, but when I try to install the extension (in Chrome), it says that Web Clipper needs access to:

- my data on all websites

- my tabs and browsing history.

I'm not comfortable with that.

I understand that in order to work, Evernote must be able to capture the things I ask it to capture. But can anyone tell me specifically what else Evernote captures, and how that's used?

Why would it need to see my browsing history, for example? Or any tab other than the one I happen to be on?

[tkaraszewski 16]

It asks for access to "your data on all websites", because we need to have permissions to read the content of any site you might want to clip, which may include "your data" - for example, if you clip rom facebook, the extension might be reading your list of facebook friends, but we couldn't be able to save this information without access to this data. The only thing we actually use this for is clipping content from these pages to your evernote account.

In an alternate scenario, we could only ask for access to (for example) "your data on www.evernote.com", but then the extension wouldn't be able to clip from any pages except those on "www.evernote.com", and that wouldn't be useful, so we need access to all sites.

And it asks for "your tabs and browsing history" because we need access to browser tabs so that we can send information back and forth between tabs and other windows. We couldn't, for instance have the clipper window send a message to the page in a given tab that it needs to be clipped without this permission. We never look at your browsing history, we only ever see see anything about a page if you clip it, but it's not possible to trigger separate "tabs" and "browsing history" permissions messages in chrome, it shows both for any extension that needs either.

There is a lengthy (and technical) description of the different permissions a Chrome extension can request here:

http://code.google.c...tml#permissions

And you can see which of those permissions will trigger which warnings here:

http://code.google.c...n_warnings.html

The actual permissions the Chrome Clipper requests are:

unlimitedStorage:

we use this for saving activity logs that you can send to customer support if you have a problem, and also for temporary storage of clips until we've sent them to the Evernote service.

contextMenus:

We use this to give you a right-click menu for clipping.

cookies:

We used to use this but recent versions of the chrome clipper no longer use your cookies (older ones only looked at your cookies for evernote.com to see if you were logged into the website). We should remove this in a future version.

tabs:

We need this so that we can communicate between tabs and other parts of the extension, like the main clipper window.

notifications:

We need this to display the "Clip Successful" message you see after clipping.

"http://*/*", "https://*/*":

These give us access to every page you might browse, so that we can clip it. As I said before, the Clipper never actually looks at any pages until you clip them.

[Owyn 457]

Thanks. Evernoted.

[Eleni 0]

May I ask if Web clipper stores/access passwords saved in the browsers as part of the "data on all websites" ?