| To view in your browser, click here. Protect your privacy, get a VPN for your phone, they said. Prevent yourself from being tracked online, get a mobile ad blocker, they said.
Maybe you followed the advice. But that doesn’t mean you’re safe.
This week, I revealed that an analytics company secretly collected data from millions of people who installed popular VPN and ad-blocking apps for Android and iOS. These apps gave the company that made them, Sensor Tower, the ability to see all traffic and data passing through the phones that ran them.
It’s an alarming example that’s completely in line with the nefarious activity apps secretly engage in. Media manipulation is about more than mis- and disinformation — and our phones are lucrative targets.
Below are just a few schemes and exploits we’ve caught evil app makers doing over the past year and a half (and here are tips to evaluate an app before you download).
- Two ad tech companies in Israel were implicated in ad fraud schemes that left users with drained batteries and depleted data plans. In both cases, the schemers stuffed hidden video ads behind banner ads that appeared in mobile apps. The most recent targeted Grindr, the queer hookup app.
- Do Global, a Chinese Android app developer with more than half a billion downloads, programmed its apps to click on ads even if the user wasn’t. Google banned the company, a Baidu subsidiary, from the Play store and removed close to 100 of its apps.
- A video app with more than 500 million downloads was secretly subscribing people to paid services and displaying hidden ads. People in India and other countries used VidMate to download YouTube videos. Meanwhile, the app was signing them up for paid subscriptions without their knowledge and draining their mobile data.
A piece of encouraging news is that Google’s Play store — the biggest app store in the world — is cracking down on some bad behavior. Last month, Google removed 600 apps for ad fraud and “disruptive” mobile ads. Cheetah Mobile, a company we exposed in late 2019 for ad fraud, was finally kicked out of the Play store as a result.
—Craig
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