Google Criticized for Blocking Windscribe VPN Chrome Extension

Google has drawn fresh criticism for blocking Windscribe VPN from updating its Chrome extension, a move that undermines tools designed to protect users.

Google claims Windscribe’s extension breaches its “Single Purpose” policy by including too many features (in this case privacy-preserving features) in one package.

The extension offers users protection through location masking, censorship circumvention, and ad and tracker blocking.

All of these capabilities work together to strengthen privacy. Yet Google insists these functions are unrelated and must be separated.

According to Google’s policy guidelines, extensions on the Chrome Web Store are supposed to deliver a single, narrowly defined purpose or focus on one limited subject area.

While these rules are framed as a way to prevent bloated or misleading extensions, in this case, they seem to work against comprehensive privacy solutions.

Google suggests that features like blocking trackers, helping users avoid surveillance, and bypassing censorship are somehow unrelated, even though they serve the common purpose of safeguarding online freedom.

Windscribe’s appeal to Google was met with a boilerplate response urging the developer to strip down its tool or break it into multiple extensions, each limited in scope.

As outlined in Google’s own documentation, extensions that combine unrelated features or request permissions beyond what is necessary for a single purpose risk rejection.

This rigid interpretation leaves little room for privacy tools that, by their nature, need to address multiple threats at once.

From a privacy-first perspective, this enforcement of the Single Purpose rule looks less like a protection of user experience and more like an obstacle to privacy innovation.

Forcing users to install and manage separate extensions to achieve the same level of protection could make them more vulnerable, not less. Each additional extension introduces another potential point of failure, more permissions to grant, and more opportunities for tracking or abuse by malicious actors.

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