If accurate, it’s likely that SimpleWeb pay Diigo to gather information on browsing habits, which they then subsequently sell or lease on to other companies for competition analysis purposes. This data is shunted over to a third-party service at “lb.“, a domain believed to be a redirect/API wrapper for the third-party service SimilarWeb. Awesome Screenshot Not Quite So Awesome After Allįor all its usefulness the Awesome Screenshot tool is imbibed with an ulterior purpose: to track and send details of every page visited and search term entered by those with it installed. Virus scans showed up nothing on his computer,” he explains.Ī bit of further sleuthing quickly threw up the culprit: Diigo‘s innocuous sounding ‘Awesome Screenshot’ extension for Google Chrome. “We had all visited many of the, but one user in particular was likely to have visited all of them due to the nature of their role.
Since this was pinging the kind of internal infrastructure links that regular web crawlers don’t have access to, Jacq dug a bit deeper, uncovering some kind of ‘browsing tracking’ software that was running on an employee’s computer. The behaviour in this add-on came to light when Miguel Jacq noticed hits to private URLs on one of the servers he manages were being made by something announcing itself as ‘niki-bot’. We recommend it for both work and play.With more than 1.3 million users, Diigo’s ‘Awesome Screenshot’ Chrome extension is an undeniably popular utility - but is its usefulness a front for something more sinister?Īccording to an investigation conducted by Miguel Jacq, a Linux system administrator with more than 10 years of experience, it seems so.ĭespite the exuberant name Awesome Screenshot is doing something decidedly unawesome in the background: harvesting your browsing data. Don't worry Awesome Screenshot has plenty of productive uses, too, such as illustrating reports. With Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate, your friends will never have to miss another hilariously doctored screen image because you didn't have the time or patience to open three different tools to save, edit, annotate and then save it again.
We didn't try the online storage and sharing option but like the idea, or at least the option. The tool also lets you save captured images locally and upload them later to a sharing site.
We had a blast capturing and editing images and entire Web pages on the fly, but that's just the beginning clicking Done displayed our final image with the option to save it locally or online, temporarily or permanently, at the publisher's site. There's even an Undo button, and a Done button to save annotated images.
If you've used Photoshop or a digital snapshot editor, you'll recognize the crop, blur, text, and color picker tools as well as tools for adding rectangles, ellipses, lines, free lines, and arrows directly to the captured image. The real fun starts when you capture an image, which opens a toolbar at the top of the main window just below Chrome's toolbar. Right-clicking the icon accesses the extension's properties, including a set of clear instructions on its Chrome page and the ability to set keyboard shortcuts for the tool's three capture functions. Clicking the extension's icon called up a small dialog letting us save the entire page, the visible portion, or a selected area, though we quickly learned that we couldn't save selected areas of secure Web pages.
Instead of opening two or three tools just to save a screen image, doctor it up, and e-mail it to your grateful friends, Awesome Screenshot can do the job in a few clicks.Ĭhrome extensions usually install virtually instantaneously, and Awesome Screenshot is no exception. Awesome Screenshot: Capture and Annotate is a free extension for Google Chrome that adds a screen capture utility with a small built-in graphics app that lets you edit, annotate, and share captured images quickly and easily via a pop-up toolbar.