Adguard Research descubre cómo varias extensiones de navegador y aplicaciones móviles recopilaban de manera invisible el historial de navegación de más de 11,000,000 de usuarios de Android e iOS.
Las aplicaciones y extensiones descubiertas haciendo esto pertenecen a una compañía de Delaware recientemente registrada llamada “Big Star Labs”, por lo que es difícil rastrearlas hasta los verdaderos beneficiarios. Esto también hace que sea casi imposible rastrear con quién compartían sus datos.
Les mostramos a continuación la lista completa de aplicaciones sospechosas y extensiones que pertenecen a “Big Star Labs”:
Block Site:
Aplicación de Android con más de 100.000 instalaciones.
Extensión de Chrome con 1,440,000+ Users.
Extensión de Firefox con más de 119,000 Users.
AdblockPrime. Privacy Policy.
An ad blocker for iOS. It is difficult to estimate the number of users since it is not distributed through the App Store.
Mobile health club applications. Privacy Policy.
Several popular Android utilities:
Speed BOOSTER: an Android app with more than 5,000,000 installations.
Battery Saver: an Android app with more than 1,000,000 installations.
AppLock | Privacy Protector: an Android app with more than 500,000 instalaciones.
Clean Droid: an Android app with more than 500,000 instalaciones.
Poper Blocker:
Extensión de Chrome con 2,280,000+ Users.
Extensión de Firefox con más de 50,000 Users.
CrxMouse. Privacy Policy.
Chrome extension with more than 410,000 Users.
The common trait of spyware apps and extensions, regardless of who owns them, is that they claim to collect data “non-personal” or “anonymous”. This doesn't sound so bad unless you know which exact data they defined as “non-personal”.
Examining browsing history, For example. One might think that a page address is not personal information, but in fact this is not entirely true. There are numerous ways to determine a person's personality by looking at their browsing history.
Researchers from Princeton and Stanford universities published a study showing that a person's online behavior can be inferred by linking anonymous web browsing history with social media profiles:
“Given a history with 30 links coming from Twitter, we can deduce the corresponding Twitter profile more than 50 percent of the time”.
But the real problem is not just that this single company knows who you are. The data collected about you can be shared, vender y combinar con datos de otras fuentes. Al final, el producto final es tu perfil completo.