By failing to make it clear to him that their privacy invading browser extension is the only way to view their data. Why did they fail to effectively communicate this to him?
You know what other add-on can "Access your data for all websites"?
uBlock Origin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Now, back to Newsguard. According to Mozilla [1], that permission is needed for an add-on to read page content. The Newsguard add-on has screenshots that show it popping up alerts for the RT Facebook page (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...) and some other post in a Facebook news feed (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/newsguard/#&g...). I don't see how the extension could provide that functionality without the permission, so giving it access to "all data for all websites" seems reasonable to me.
Insufficient evidence has been presented to make the case that the extension is "privacy invading." Do you have more to support your conclusion, or did you just jump to it?
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess...
Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website? If I'm curious what they think of any given website, why must I install their extension to find out? The only reason I can think of to not facilitate that sort of workflow is to coerce the curious into installing the extension, which I consider to be nefarious until proven otherwise.
That's such a strange attitude. Yes, reputation matters, but there was a time when gorhill was unknown and had none. As far as I can tell, you're just ignorant of this extension, and assuming it's untrustworthy because of your ignorance of its trustworthiness (and likely some preexisting bias).
> Why do they make you use their extension, instead of simply letting you enter URLs on their website?
Isn't it blindingly obvious? They want to put user-friendly reputation-indicators on the page, without making their users go though a lot of extra hassle. This is a fairly common use case services that provide reputation ratings (e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-f... for another example).
If I had to guess, the main audience for this isn't people with good media literacy skills, it's people who tend to gullibly believe sketchy websites (and who have friends or relatives with good media literacy skills who want to help them).
