The Chrome Web Store is still something of a wild west — seemingly every month, there's a story about some popular extension stealing user data or doing something else it's not supposed to do. Google has already made several policy changes lately, and its next target is spammy extensions.

"The increase in adoption of the extension platform has also attracted spammers and fraudsters introducing low-quality and misleading extensions in an attempt to deceive and trick our users into installing them to make a quick profit," Google wrote in a blog post. "Therefore, in order to keep the quality of our inventory high and help users find what they want, we’re introducing some updates to our spam policy."

First, extensions with inflated ratings, install counts, and reviews may be removed from the Chrome Web Store. Also, developers can't provide incentives for leaving reviews, which is exactly what the Play Store already bans.

Google is also cracking down on extensions that send spam notifications, or send messages on behalf of the user without any confirmation. The new policies go into effect on August 27th, 2020, so developers have until then to get their act together.

Source: Chromium Blog