One of the largest online companies in the world is the Chinese company Alibaba. It has a browser application called UC browser available on the Android Play Store store or Apple App Store. When the UC browser has been revealed for the first time, it has been promised that the browser would offer incognito mode that has not recorded web navigation or search history. The browser has also promised fast downloads and its feature set made it very popular around the world, up 500 million downloads on the Android platform.
While the browser is not commonly used in the United States, it is currently the fourth browser the largest by globally download numbers, mainly thanks to the Asian market. The GABI CIRLIG security researcher has published a report that has found that the confidentiality requests made by the browser are misleading. Independent researchers also checked its conclusions.
CIRLIG found that the Android and IOS versions of the UC browser follow each website of a user visit, whether in Incognito mode or not. The data on their navigation habits are sent to servers belonging to UCWeb. The data sent to the servers include an IP address, which could be used to get the rough location of the reduced user in a specific city or even a specific neighborhood.
The investigation revealed that if the waiters were registered in China and wore an extension of .cn Chinese domain name, they were hosted in the United States. The servers also assigned an identification number to each user so that the activity on different websites can be monitored. This is done with precision with the data collected is a mystery.
However, Ciririg claims that data could easily rot fingerprint users and connect them to their actual actual characters. Tracking activities have been discovered by reverse engineering some of the encrypted CIRLIG data identified being sent to China. The researcher indicates that monitoring of this type is done on purpose regardless of the privacy of users.
