If you've been confused by the sudden appearance of a Looking Glass plug-in in your Firefox browser, you're not alone - it's actually part of a Mr. Robot promotional campaign being run in partnership with Mozilla. While it was disabled by default, its sudden appearance had plenty of users worried.
To make matters worse the original description of the extension read "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS", which isn't the most comforting summary in this age of increased privacy paranoia.
The extension doesn't actually do anything until you opt into the Alternate Reality Game that Mozilla is developing with the creators of Mr. Robot - as is explained on the plug-in's official support page - but it still spooked quite a few users, which is understandable.
"Fun" and "unique"
In response to the criticism around this unasked-for extension, Mozilla is now moving it to the add-on store just like regular extensions, and promising never to spring such a surprise on users again. If you have the add-on installed at the moment, you can remove it by typing "about:addons" into the address bar and removing Looking Glass.
"Our goal with the custom experience we created with Mr. Robot was to engage our users in a fun and unique way," Mozilla told Engadget in a statement. "Real engagement also means listening to feedback."
"And so while the web extension/add-on that was sent out to Firefox users never collected any data," Mozilla continues, "and had to be explicitly enabled by users playing the game before it would affect any web content, we heard from some of our users that the experience we created caused confusion."
