Antivirus vendor Trend Micro has apologized after its Mac apps were found collecting browser histories from people's computers.
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On Monday, Trend Micro confirmed that the macOS apps were harvesting what it called a 'small snapshot' of users' browser histories. The apps include the security-focused product Dr. Antivirus, in addition to device optimization tools such as Dr. Cleaner and Dr. Battery, which were all booted from Apple's official app store this past weekend over the data collection.
By lifting your browser history, Trend Micro could conceivably see the sites you've visited and potentially share those details with third parties. However, the antivirus vendor is pushing back on claims that it knowingly violated customers' privacy. 'This was a one-time data collection, done for security purposes,' the company said in a blog post.
According to Trend Micro, the data harvesting would occur 24 hours after an app was installed as a way to check whether the computer had encountered any adware or other malicious threats. All browser data was sent to a US-based Amazon server controlled by Trend Micro.
The vendor also claims that the data harvesting was nothing covert. 'The potential collection and use of browser history data was explicitly disclosed in the applicable EULAs (end user license agreements) and data collection disclosures accepted by users for each product at installation,' it said.
Nevertheless, Trend Micro has decided to remove the browser history collecting capability from all the company's Mac apps. It's also dumped all browser history logs from the Amazon server.
In the same blog post, Trend Micro also seemed to admit that the company's non-security Mac apps, such as the device optimization products Dr. Cleaner, Dr. Battery, and two others called Dr. Unarchiver and Duplicate Finder, should've refrained from collecting browser histories.
'We have learned that browser collection functionality was designed in common across a few of our applications and then deployed the same way for both security-oriented as well as the non-security oriented apps such as the ones in discussion. This has been corrected,' the company said.
This issue first cropped up on Friday, when a pair of security researchers published a report that said the Mac app Adware Doctor secretly logged browser histories into a password-protected zip file and uploaded them to a server based in China. Trend Micro said that reports its apps were sending data to China are 'absolutely false.'
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Despite Trend Micro's apology, not everyone in the security community is buying the company's explanations.
Let me translate: 'Because it got exposed, we removed the malware feature from our products.' pic.twitter.com/30mx4vD2Cl
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) September 11, 2018
Tissuprt.exe
Thomas Reed, the Malwarebytes security researcher who flagged the problem last week, also said he didn't find any explicit mention of Trend Micro's he said in a blog post.
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