At Least 20 VPN, Ad-blocking Apps With 35 Million Downloads Are Spying On People

Dhir Acharya - Mar 13, 2020

The apps are all owned by the analytics firm Sensor Tower. The bigger problem here is that these VPN, ad-blocking apps are supposed to protect us.

A recent investigation discovered that at least 20 VPN and ad-blocking apps owned by Sensor Tower might have been spying on users’ phones.

Sensor Tower is an analytics company that owned more than 20 iOS and Android apps claimed to be VPNs and ad blockers. However, like the Onavo app of Facebook, when these apps are activated, they will have access to the traffic on a phone and share the findings with their owner, Sensor Tower. According to BuzzFeed, who conducted the investigation, users of these apps are prompted to install a root certificate through a third-party website, which dodges security restrictions on the Google Play Store and the App Store.

Those apps do not reveal who it’s connected to or who it sends user data to, BuzzFeed said. Among them, four apps were recently available on Google Play Store, including Adblock Focus, Mobile Data, Luna VPN, and Free and Unlimited VPN. Luna Vpn and Adblock Focus were also available on Apple’s App Store.

Those 20 apps were downloaded 35 million times in total. Most of them were pulled from the app stores due to violating rules while Google and Apple deleted others after being contacted, and they are investigating the other apps.

Randy Nelson, head of mobile insights at Sensor Tower, said that its original intention was to build an ad blocker, saying that it makes sense to exist a relationship between an analytics firm and such apps.

Nelson added that SensorTower takes the guidelines on the app stores seriously and that it makes an effort to comply with the guidelines and their changes. He also said that the apps did not collect sensitive or identifiable information on users such as usernames and passwords.