> It’s an entirely different thing if it delegates its privileges to a web service that could do anything and that nobody can inspect.
Would it be more accurate then to say it potentially lets Amazon track you? Without the word "potentially," or similar, it makes it sound like they are in fact doing it when you just said it "could."
To be clear, I'm not the author so I cannot answer on their behalf.
In my opinion though, "could" is so close to "potentially" in definition that it seems rather pedantic to hinge the entire article and its conclusions on that single choice of word.
If Amazon does track some users of their extension right now, we wouldn’t know. It’s a web service, nobody can tell whether it behaves the same for everyone. It has all the privileges, and I can look into what it does with these privileges in my case, but I cannot tell whether it works the same for you.
Would it be more accurate then to say it potentially lets Amazon track you? Without the word "potentially," or similar, it makes it sound like they are in fact doing it when you just said it "could."