How safe are all these plugins we install to escape tracking? Are we trying to escape big tech tracking only to hand our information over to extension developers? Looking at network traffic often shows a ton of extensions sending data to some aws server almost perpetually.

Asking because I'm not sure of the answer to this question and lately I've become even warier so I decided to uninstall everything except things I absolutely must have like colorzilla, grammarly and full-page screen capture. For adblocking I use brave and never ever touch firefox, opera or chrome.

There's an extension that appends a share=1 parameter to all quora links to prevent them from forcing you to sign in in order to view a post. I like it but I'm trying to minimize my extensions footprint and I'd rather write my own script to perform the same script.

The question is, how do you get to be sure that an extension is safe?