Ad Blockers Betrayal: How Popular Extensions Are Harvesting Your AI Chats
Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but, surprise! Four popular browser extensions are doing the opposite. These extensions are Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker, secretly scooping up your AI conversations and sharing them with developers. Protecting your privacy? More like partying with your data!
Hot Take:
Hey there! If you thought your ad blocker or VPN was your trusty sidekick in the wild west of the internet, think again. Turns out, some of these trusty tools have been snitching on you, collecting your juicy AI conversations and selling them like hotcakes! Who knew your private chats with ChatGPT would end up in the hands of data brokers? Yikes! Time to clean house and uninstall those sneaky extensions!
Key Points:
- Four browser extensions: Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker are harvesting chatbot conversations.
- These extensions target conversations across ten AI platforms including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.
- The extensions use aggressive techniques to intercept and transmit browser interactions.
- Data collected is sold for marketing purposes, disguised as protective monitoring.
- Google’s Chrome Web Store policies have loopholes that allow such data transfers.