The "mystery" company behind the extensions is Genimous, parent company of Polarity Technologies. Polarity owns the extension referenced in the Awake blog post:

https://awakesecurity.com/blog/google-doppelganger-malicious...

Update: Medium has restored the article. The Chinese troll army failed to suppress the news for long.

Please see a screenshot of the full article here:

https://imgur.com/a/uJxate0

For the data table, go here:

https://airtable.com/shrtyVQQG1DhaXIxx

It looks like this company is trying very hard to suppress this news. A media blackout might work in China, but not in America.

I am in contact with Medium to get the article restored. If anyone has a Medium contact, any help would be appreciated.

They use Bing for their search results and ads. Microsoft does all the work to onboard advertisers.

These extensions do not simply change the default search in the browser. They actively hijack searches on the Google and Bing homepages. Test it yourself in a sandbox.

A user who literally types in Google.com or Bing.com into their browser address bar intends to conduct a search using Google or Bing. Their intention is very clear. It is not to have their search hijacked and taken to a "private" search engine.

They also use Bing to power their search results and ads so Microsoft is still able to collect the user's data.

It's still sort of doing what the extension says it is going to do. On the extension page it says

"Keep your searches private by redirecting searches that may be tracked to Search Encrypt, a privacy-focused search engine... For your privacy, Search Encrypt intercepts the requests if it's on our list of sites"

So it says it hijacks right in the description.

On their website for their "search engine" it says

"The Search Encrypt encrypts your search terms between your computer and searchencrypt.com. Search Encrypt is supported by sponsored ads featured on our search results page."

Which obviously (to you and me anyways, not to others) is also done at Google so there is no actual benefit other than Google doesn't get your data.

My conclusion is that, yes, they are scummy and taking advantage of fears of people to make a buck. But is it an outright scam? Not so clear.

your searches are not private though, since one they're decrypted on searchencrypt.com, they're logged as per chinese government reporting laws.

Private is a BS term, can mean just about anything. If it's private from the US gov but not China, that might be "private" enough for some, obviously not for others. But it's also nowhere near certain your assumption is true.

OTOH, otherwise it's the five eyes and NSA logging them. Both alternatives are really, really bad in my opinion.

Google Ads allow audience targeting based on user interests or affinity groups. This is inferred using past Google searches and pages visited. An advertiser can add as many of these groups as they want to a campaign and get visibility into their visitors' interests.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497941?hl=en