This is an incredibly weak "apology". They got caught doing shady shit and people have a right to be upset. If they were exfiltrating data like they said for use with SimilarWeb this is actually against Google's own TOS for hosting the extension on the Chrome Web Store - meaning if enough people reported it, it could be taken down.
Saying that "Google doesn't provide this information correctly" is also just playing to people's misunderstanding of how any of this works. Google has an incredible amount of analytics details, assuming you set everything up correctly. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll screenshot my analytics homescreen for Enhanced Steam's web store traffic:
This is just the analytics from the Chrome Web Store portion of Enhanced Steam, but it paints a pretty good picture of how many people are installing Enhanced Steam, how long it takes them to do so, what time of day it's most popular, where the referrals for installation are coming from, how many people are engaged at any given moment, which countries it's most popular in, user engagement, etc. This is all done with a single Google Analytics tracking cookie on the Chrome Web Store and isn't baked into the Enhanced Steam code in any way. It doesn't have to track user's browsing habits everywhere and it gives me the relevant info I need to know where efforts need to be focused. For example, Russia used to be the #2 user but in the past 8 months China has taken that spot. I assume this data is a somewhat representative slice of Steam's community as a whole.
Contrast that to SimilarWeb
who was scurtinized for this very practice by the FTC in 2016 which resulted in the takedown of several affected extensions including SimilarWeb's own Chrome extension.
If they really needed this type of information, it's all available on the Steam website anyway via cookies (your region, your language, which Steam pages you visit) and they could have simply extended their application to ship back user data while the user was engaged on the Steam website (still shady, especially since it wouldn't have triggered any permissions changes, but not nearly as egregious). The bottom line is that they don't to spy on their users like this to gain insights into how their extension is used and by whom - this is naked greed and avarice.
The fact that they're reversing the decision and begging people not to make 1 star reviews is kinda pathetic. Even though this particular scheme is being foiled, I would be hesitant to trust these fools going forward.
