The browser sees all the logins we make, with websites, usernames, and passwords in plain text. How do we know it isn’t remembering them and sending them back to the mother ship?
It’s possible someone would inspect the code of open source browsers and make a noise if they found something, but even then most people don’t build from source, so there’s no need for the source to be the same as the downloaded app.
2FA makes it less of a problem, but there are still plenty of juicy pickings for the evil browser.
In: Technology
Somebody would notice, simple as that. There are people out there who will monitor every scrap of network traffic that is coming out of their computer, either for cybersecurity research or because they’re simply that paranoid, and they would be able to tell if the browser communicated something it shouldn’t. The likes of Google and Mozilla make a lot of money from their browsers (despite them being “free”), so it’s simply not worth it to them to take a risk like this.
As for the downloaded app not being the same as the source says it is, again, somebody, somewhere, will compile the app from source and will have questions if the resulting executable differs from the pre-compiled one.
This is all assuming you’re getting your browser from official sources, of course.
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