





439





645 Shares

A browser extension named Ahoy! which acts as an Anti-Censorship tool and allows users to access more than 1700 blocked websites has been removed from Google Chrome’s Web Store. The app was popular with countries with harder internet censorship rules.

Ahoy! uses its own proxies to bypass traffic which allows users to navigate through a free and open internet. The extension can also detect newly blocked domains and feed the data back to Ahoy Servers so the unblocking of the websites stays up to date. Ahoy! has grown to more than 185,000 users this year.

“Google decided to remove us from Chrome’s Web Store without any justification”, Henrique, Development Team member of Ahoy! has informed News. We always make sure our code is high quality, secure and 100% free (as in beer and as in freedom). All the source code is open source. And we’re pretty sure we never broke any of the Google’s marketplace rules.”

The author of the extension has tried to re-submit the extension to the Chrome Web Store but it didn’t work. As of now, the extension has more than 174K active users which has been dropping ever since the day of removal at the rate of 500 users/per day.

“The source code is 100% open source, so it’s easy to see that we’re not doing anything sketchy, we really care about our users’ privacy and security. If we’re doing something wrong, we don’t know what,” Henrique complains.

The issue is going to be critical for the extension as 98% of the users are going to access Ahoy! from the Chrome Web Store.

Take your time to comment on this article.