Niall Kennedy has a blog post entitled Netvibes module developer collects web credentials, personal content where he writes
A developer created a Netvibes module and submitted it for inclusion in the Netvibes Ecosystem module directory. A Netvibes employee examined and approved the submitted module for inclusion in the directory. The remotely-hosted module was then altered by the developer to retrieve stored preferences from other configured modules and store information from other modules loaded in the page such as the contents of a webnote, the user's latest Gmail messages, upcoming appointments and contacts, etc. The developer stored this data in a remote database and later examined his collected findings. Each Netvibes module is rendered inline, meshing the markup generated by the module with the rest of the page's content. A module developer is encouraged to access only their own module's content using a special Netvibes variable, but any developer can request other content on the page through standard JavaScript or the Prototype JavaScript framework.
A developer created a Netvibes module and submitted it for inclusion in the Netvibes Ecosystem module directory. A Netvibes employee examined and approved the submitted module for inclusion in the directory. The remotely-hosted module was then altered by the developer to retrieve stored preferences from other configured modules and store information from other modules loaded in the page such as the contents of a webnote, the user's latest Gmail messages, upcoming appointments and contacts, etc. The developer stored this data in a remote database and later examined his collected findings.
Each Netvibes module is rendered inline, meshing the markup generated by the module with the rest of the page's content. A module developer is encouraged to access only their own module's content using a special Netvibes variable, but any developer can request other content on the page through standard JavaScript or the Prototype JavaScript framework.
I talked to Niall about this on IM and upon reading the blog post from the Netvibes team as well as Niall's summary of the situations it seems they are doing at least three things wrong from a security perspective.
All of these are safeguards that we take in Windows Live Gallery, Windows Live Spaces and Live.com to prevent malicious gadgets. I'm stunned that the response of the Netvibes developers is to change the text of their warning message and allow user rating of gadgets. Neither of are significant mitigations to the threats to their service and I'd recommend that they reconsider and actually secure their service instead of pushing this onto their users.