Google Takes Down Anti-Censorship Extension 'Ahoy!' From Chrome

In a decision that's seems to be going confronting the very essence of Google's erstwhile motto of 'Don't be Evil', the company has reportedly removed an anti-censorship extension from its Chrome spider web-store. Dubbed 'Ahoy!', the software is open up-source, and its source code is available on GitHub.

Developed by Portugal-based anti-censorship grouping, Revolução dos Bytes (Bytes' Revolution), the extension helps featherbed blocked sites through the group's own proxies, allowing users to navigate in a free, uncensored internet.

In an interview to TorrentFreak, the group'southward Henrique Mouta claimed that Ahoy! had as many as 185,000 users on Chrome before being unceremoniously taken down past Google. "Google decided to remove u.s.a. from Chrome's Web Shop without any justification", he claimed.

Equally 1 would expect, the user-base has apparently been falling with each passing day since the accept-down. According to Mouta, the extension was seeing an boilerplate of effectually 500 new installations per day, but is now really losing effectually 500 active users on a daily basis.

Google Takes Down Popular Anti-Censorship Extension 'Ahoy!' From Chrome Web Store

"Correct now, nosotros have 174k active users on Chrome, apace dropping … I can tell you that we've noticed a spider web traffic drop on our API of nearly ~25%", he said.

What'south been really frustrating for the team is Google's unwillingness to fifty-fifty reply to their queries about why the extension was removed from the shop, and how they tin can set it in social club to comply with the company'southward regulations.

The source lawmaking is 100% open source, then it'due south easy to see that we're non doing anything sketchy, nosotros really care nearly our users' privacy and security. If we're doing something wrong, we don't know what

It'southward important to annotation here that the extension is also available on Firefox, and can be downloaded from Mozilla's Firefox improver repository without whatever issues. Just with Google seemingly unwilling to budge from its position, the developers take at present gear up up a new site from where users volition be able to manually install the extension on Chrome.