eKstreme Uncovers a Spy (Or Not)
by DazzlinDonna
eKstreme (Pierre Far) did a little snooping on a tool that has just recently been lauded by quite a few SEOs. This extension, the Social Media for Firefox extension, seems like a really great tool. Oh, but what did eKstreme discover about it? It’s spying on us??!! Pierre has all the details of his detective work. Go see it for yourself.
Nice detective work, Pierre. I wouldn’t have even checked.
UPDATE: Please see Chris’s comment below. Pierre confirmed that this is panning out to be an innocent mistake, and since Chris and his team are working hard to resolve it, I’d say this is one we don’t need to worry about. Still, it’s great that Pierre caught the problem, and even greater that Chris’s team is working so hard to resolve it.
DazzlinDonna,
We had built the DB to track errors, and that is it. We saw Pierre’s post and I immediately contacted him to give him full access to our reports, and we will be making updates to the toolbar based off of his recommendation.
Because SU and Reddit do not have API’s we wanted to track errors as there were a lot of different problems we were having with them. We created this Toolbar to help the SEO community and there is now why I would want to to anything to put a users info in jeopardy. I have built 97th Floor from the ground up it is my life and there is now way I would let an FF extension ruin that.
I am not sleeping until this is taken care of. Pierre is being really cool in helping us out. We are going to announce what we find and what we did to fix it on the blog along with a new version that will be forced on everyones next FF load.
I will keep you posted.
Good to know, Chris. Pierre confirmed this with me as well. I’ll update the post so there’s no confusion about it.
Thanks Donna,
We are already almost ready to send out the new version
We have fixed everything per Pierre’s advice, the new post explaining everything with the new “Clean and Safe” version is live.
http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/first-update-to-social-media-for-firefox-extension-we-are-not-spying-on-you/
Very nice! A big thumbs up to you guys!
Thanks for the scoop. I am glad this all got sorted out so quickly. Chris and 97th are great and I am just happy the tool, which is awesome, is now safe.