https://www.koi.ai/blog/urban-vpn-browser-extension-ai-conversations-data-collection
A Google Chrome extension with over 6 million users has been observed silently collecting every prompt entered by users into popular AI-powered chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others. The extension in question, Urban VPN Proxy, is advertised as a secure VPN service but has been updated to include a tailored script that intercepts and exfiltrates users’ chat conversations to remote servers.
The extension, which also has 1.3 million installations on Microsoft Edge, overrides the browser’s network request APIs to capture the user’s prompts, the chatbot’s responses, conversation identifiers, timestamps, and session metadata. This data is then sent to two remote servers owned by Urban Cyber Security Inc., the Delaware-based company behind the extension. The company claims the data is collected for “marketing analytics purposes” and that it will be anonymised, but it also shares the raw, non-anonymised data with an affiliated ad intelligence firm, BIScience.
Despite the extension’s “Featured” badge on the Chrome Web Store, which implies it meets the platform’s “best practices and high standards,” researchers have discovered that the data harvesting occurs regardless of whether the extension’s “AI protection” feature is enabled. This feature is designed to warn users about sharing personal information, while the developers fail to disclose that the extension is simultaneously exfiltrating the entire chat conversation to its own servers. This type of data collection and sharing without user consent poses a serious risk to users’ privacy and security.