UC Browser, one of the biggest web browsing apps in the world thanks to huge user bases in Asia, claims to respect user privacy. But it has been harvesting its users’ website visits via its UC Browser app, even when incognito mode is turned on, researchers warn.
Cirlig was able to uncover the problem by reverse engineering some encrypted data he spotted being sent back to Beijing. Once the key had been cracked, he was able to see that every time he visited a website, it was being encrypted and transmitted back to the Alibaba company. On Apple’s iOS, he didn’t even need to reverse engineer the encryption because there effectively was none on the device ..
There was another issue with the iOS version of the Alibaba-owned app: because it hadn’t been updated after Apple introduced a feature on the App Store to detail the privacy practices of each app, the harvesting of users’ web browsing was not disclosed to the user. As of last week, though, an unspecified, unannounced update to the App Store meant that the tracking via unique identifiers and search histories were included in the privacy information for the app.
Nicolas Agnese, an Argentina-based cybersecurity researcher who validated what was happening with the UC Web app on iPhones, raised another issue: whilst iOS was “very secure” in some ways, he was concerned privacy-infringing practices could be allowed on apps once they get through the App Store review process.in April, the $600 billion market cap Alibaba had been fretting about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature, which lets users block apps from tracking them.
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