UC Browser is a web browser that promotes itself as a useful alternative to any other browser available both for Android and PC. It’s advertised advantage is the “enhanced mode” that allegedly saves mobile data by effectively compressing it.
Belonging to Alibaba, UC Browser is one of the most popular browsers for Android, specially in China and India, although is has gained some popularity also in western countries. According to information provided by Edward Snowden, and as reported by CBC News Canada and The Intercepter, several organizations infitrated UC Browser in 2011, inserting in some cases programs whose goal was to spy and steal data from affected mobile phones.
Citizen Lab, a research group for Toronto’s University, analyzed both the Chinese and English UC Browser versions for the CBC News report and found several important security and privacy issues; such issues included measures that allowed the spies to save: all searches performed by affected users, data saved in the SIM card and hardware identification numbers that could be used to track users. Citizen Lab warned UC Browser about this issues last April, therefore current versions are supposed to be fixed by now.
Search keywords are sent to Yahoo India and Google without any encryption; IMEI number, Android ID and Mac addresses are also sent non-encrypted to Umeng (an Alibaba analysis tool). Finally geographical information such as longitude/latitude is also sent unprotected to AMAP (an Alibaba mapping tool).
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