Boo! Facebook Disconnect’s Scary Install Dialog

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It’s Halloween, a good time to answer a frequently asked question about this scary confirmation box that pops up when you install Facebook Disconnect:

Google Chrome Extensions, like all installable software, can potentially do bad things and the extension gallery displays accordingly dire warning messages. Unlike compiled programs, though, extensions let you easily view their (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) source code to make sure they don’t actually do anything malicious.

Facebook Disconnect triggers a warning because the extension has to inject JavaScript into every page you browse to disable the component Facebook links. There are three ways to get a packaged extension’s code (a topic worthy of its own post), but you can just look in my repository since I’ve open-sourced Facebook Disconnect.

Update (December 3, 2010): If you’d rather take my word for it than read my code — Facebook Disconnect doesn’t store your personal data and never will, unless you opt in to anonymously provide data for diagnostic purposes in the future.[source]

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