Even weirder: Why would Google give so many the "Featured" stamp for trustworthiness?

Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.

After the release of the Secure Annex ‘Monitor’ feature, I wanted to help evaluate a list of extensions an organization I was working with had configured for monitoring. Notifications when new changes occur is great, but in security, baselines are everything!

To cut down a list of 132 extensions in use, I identified a couple extensions that stuck out because they were ‘unlisted’ in the Chrome Web Store. Unlisted extensions are not indexed by search engines and do not show up when searching the Chrome Web Store. The only way to access the extension is by knowing the URL.