1340811 - [Policy Violation] TrackMeNot resets default search engine

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(addons.mozilla.org :: Security, defect)

Description

[Cliff Berg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170125094131

Steps to reproduce:

The TrackMeNot add-on keeps setting my default search engine to Yahoo. To prove this, I deleted my Firefox installation (on the Mac, this includes the <user>/Library/Application Support/Firefox folder). Then I re-installed it, and added my add-ons back one by one. After adding TrackMeNot, the behavior returned.


Actual results:

It resets the default search engine to Yahoo at periodic intervals - it seems to be about an hour, but the precise interval is not clear.


Expected results:

It should respect my default search engine setting and not change it. I believe this is a violation of add-on policy.

Comment 1

[Frederik Braun [:freddy]]

The add-on in question is probably https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/
What's worse, there are already reports in the reviews that also tell us they are messing with the search settings,
e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/?src=search

Comment 2

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

The whole point of that addon it that it randomizes the search engine periodically.  Given that, I think this bug is invalid.