So Imagine an Application with over a half a billion downloads mostly positive rating and all of the income this app has generated over the years and then that's same app decided to get greedy and doing shady things.
Ultimately leading to being banned from the google play store as well as other app stores including the Amazon app store.
What App Am I Referring To
So this is not the first time this app brought public scepticism and raised eyebrows across the tech industry and the name of this app am referring to is called Clean Master.
Clean Master is an extremely popular application for Andriod devices and I know a lot of you probably use this or may have used this in the past and it's own by the parent company based in china called cheetah mobile.
What Happened? && What Did They Do?
Let me first start off by showing you the google play store and you will notice typing Clean Master you'll have some other that look just like it but none are from cheetah mobile as it been banned from google play store.
You might remember back in March 2020 when google removed over 600 applications from Play store that violated their terms and conditions. Clean Master was one of those apps that were removed from the play store evidently they were collecting private web browsing data from its users( ex.search queries, which website were visited, access data from private web sessions, wifi access points etc).
And allegedly misuse it for advertisement fraud by feeding its ad network algorithm which was completely unethical and goes against google's guidelines. And the scary part Clean Master was installed over half a billion Andriod phones which is absolutely massive. In fact, cheetah mobile was the third biggest google play publisher behind Facebook and Google itself.
Cheetah Mobile Respond
They respond to the claims stating that to make sure that the site were safe and then add that they do not track data or breach its user's privacy. Although several private researcher and google's give a completely different picture. Cheetah mobile acquired three large ad networks and google feels they were taking the user's data to feed it's own ads algorithms and who knows what else they cloud be using that data for.
In any case, whatever transpired is not on the up and up and that's why you should uninstall this app and always read applications terms and conditions before installing it.There are many application which requires invasive access to your photo data and this is why you always need to be o top of downloading new applications especially ones that are free.
And if you are serious about security and protecting your android phone it better to get a proven security app and so check out this article from Tom's Guide he listed the best Android antivirus apps for 2020 I encourage you to check it out.
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Thank you for your concern for the safety of others. More power to you.