Following a series of recent reports of fraudulent transactions using the Chrome Web Store (CWS) payment extension system. Google temporarily suspends all those extensions of the popular Internet browser, awaiting a resolution.
In an official statement on Tuesday, the company cited a “Significant increase in the number of fraudulent transactions involving paid Chrome extensions” as the reason behind his tough stance.
Fortunately, items that do not use payments from the Chrome Web Store are not affected by this issue.
Chrome paid extensions (disabled / disable)
Google says that it is only "temporarily" suspending the publication of paid extensions in the CWS. According to the company: “Due to the magnitude of this abuse, we have temporarily disabled the publication of paid extensions in Google Chrome. This is a temporary measure intended to stop this influx as we seek long-term solutions to address the broader pattern of abuse… We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible, but do not have a resolution timeline at this time.”.
It should be noted that Google does not allow new extensions to be published at a cost in its web store. However, paid extensions that were released before the suspension are still available to purchase from the Chrome Web Store.
Not only has Google often been criticized for failing to protect the Android ecosystem with malware-laden games and apps entering the Play Store. But it has also had trouble addressing security and privacy issues in the Chrome Web Store. And this is largely thanks to rogue developers who have tried to exploit loopholes within the system to take advantage of unsuspecting users.
However, things have changed for the better since May 2019. When the company announced Project Strobe's updated policies for Chrome extensions and the Drive API to strengthen the review process for third-party developer access to the Drive account, Google already data from users' Android devices.
As things stand now, there is no timetable at this time for the ban to be lifted. So it will be interesting to see how the company manages to address long-term security issues in the future.
Are you users of Google Chrome and paid extensions? Leave a comment if you have noticed something strange.