Some mobile ad-blockers and VPNs siphoning user data, report finds

Enlarge / It's not actually quite this stylish when your personal data is unwittingly siphoned from your phone. (credit: PM Images | Getty Images)

Generally, if someone is installing a VPN or ad-blocker on their mobile phone, they're doing it to increase their privacy. But several apps distributed by an analytics firm that hid its connection to them have been doing the exact opposite, instead siphoning data from millions of users, a new report finds.

BuzzFeed News reports that the apps come from Sensor Tower, a firm that bills itself as "the leading provider of market intelligence and insights for the global app economy." The company analyzes app use across platforms to, for example, list the top-grossing applications across platforms in a given month. (Spoiler: It's apparently always Tinder.)

Sensor Tower, founded in 2013, has published at least 20 Android and iOS apps of its own in the past five years, such as Luna VPN and Adblock Focus. BuzzFeed found that several of these apps, sometime after installation, prompt users to install a root certificate in order to access features. For example, Luna VPN gives users a prompt to add an extension for blocking ads in YouTube. Following-through takes users to an external website to download and install the certificate, thus doing an end run around Google and Apple restrictions.

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