As far as I know (anybody please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this), it's Adblock PLUS that can't be trusted. Adblock (without the plus) is a completely separate project that's much more trustworthy. Adblock PLUS basically usurped Adblock by appending a "plus", making it seem like it's somehow better than Adblock.
It's not like that. A long time ago (2005?) there was an extension for Firefox called "Adblock". Eventually the development of this extension died, and it got forked with the name "Adblock Plus" in 2006 or so.
The Adblock you're referring to (the Chrome-only extension, right?) was published in 2009. As you can see, Adblock Plus predates it by 3 years or so.
