Adware Blocker: Popular Mac Ad-Blocker Has Been Sending Data to China

[TheBlackAdder]

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People use ad-blockers for all sorts of reasons. Some want to stop advertising companies from collecting information about them, some don't want to financially support ad-dependent websites and some just want the sites they visit to load faster. It's unlikely that anyone would use an ad-blocker because they want to share their browsing history with someone in China, but that appears to be exactly what the Adware Doctor app does.

Adware Doctor is one of the highest grossing paid apps in the Mac App Store. It's supposed to do what every other ad-blocker does: prevent online tracking and stop advertisements from loading. Yet after numerous complaints about the app doing things it shouldn't, like changing settings in Safari and secretly collecting users' browser history, Objective-See owner Patrick Wardle decided to figure out what exactly the suspicious doc is up to.

Wardle detailed his findings in a blog post today. The long and short of it is that even though Adware Doctor is an effective ad-blocker, it also collects browser history from Safari, Chrome and Firefox, which it then bundles up and sends to someone in China. Wardle said the actual exfiltration is currently disabled, but the version of Adware Doctor available in the Mac App Store will still collect this information and get ready to send it as soon as it can.

Updated, 9/7/2018, 10:30am PT: Apple has removed Adware Doctor from the Mac App Store. The utility is still listed as one of the top paid apps on Apple's website, but it's no longer available to purchase.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adware-doctor-sends-data-china,37764.html


While the article title says it sends data to China, the researcher says it's just bundling it for transport.

I'd delete it, pronto! Especially before the election.

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