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According to the article Warning: Your Browser Extensions Are Spying On You:

Browser add-ons for Chrome, Firefox, and probably other browsers are tracking every single page you visit and sending that data back to a third-party company that pays them for your information.

[...]

Millions of people are being tracked this way and they don’t have a clue.

The BBC recently wrote in the article It is easy to expose users' secret web habits, say researchers:

The information revealed an intimate portrait of the browsing habits of people, said Ms Eckert.

[...]

The pair found that 95% of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions.

How do I keep myself save in this regard? Is there some white list of friendly browser extensions? To take a specific example, how do I tell whether my uBlock extension is safe?

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    A general rule is: if your browser is running, it's leaking data.
    – Ron Trunk
    Commented Aug 21, 2017 at 14:37
  • Depends on the browser, if it's Chrome, then it's botnet anyway.
    – Display Name
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 6:13

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A technical solution to find out how talkative browser plugins are is to use a network traffic analyzer like Wireshark. The actual traffic might be encrypted, but you can at least tell if your webbrowser suddenly makes requests to unrelated servers it did not make before.

A legal solution is to try to find the privacy policy and terms of use of a browser plugin. In most jurisdictions, companies are legally obligated to notify their users when they collect private information.

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