Skip to main content

UC Browser Reportedly Under Government Scanner for Sending Data to China


UC Browser, the most popular mobile browser in India, is reportedly being probed by the government for sending data from Indian users out of the country. According to Business Standard, "a government lab in Hyderabad is probing how Alibaba-owned UC Browser can send user details and location data to a remote server".

According to reports, UC Browser sends data including device's IMEI number and location data to a server in China on connecting to a Wi-Fi network.

In May 2015, a a Canadian technology research group reported that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd paid more than $1 billion for leaking sensitive user data and said that is a privacy risk. Citizen Lab said Chinese and English-language versions of UC Browser made easily available to third parties personally identifiable information like location, search details and mobile subscriber and device numbers.

Last week, the government also asked all smartphone companies, majority of them Chinese manufacturers, to outline the procedures and processes adopted by them to ensure security and privacy of users' data.

Mobile manufacturers and software providers have a long history of tracking users, without always disclosing the fact. Even when it's disclosed, the amount of data being collected is often a lot more than users realize, so UC Browser would not be unique in this. However, with tensions between India and China at a high right now, it perhaps explains why there is scrutiny relating to any app sending data to the latter country.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Firefox Runs Like a Rabbit

New version releases of browsers don't get the buzz they used to get, but Firefox Quantum is an exception. The latest version of the Mozilla Foundation's browser, released Tuesday, is all about performance. Firefox is twice as fast as it was a year ago, Mozilla claimed. It is not only fast on startup -- it remains zippy even when taxed by multitudes of tabs. "We have a better balance of memory to performance than all the other browsers," said Firefox Vice President for Product Nick Nguyen. "We use 30 percent less memory, and the reason for that is we can allocate the number of processes Firefox uses on your computer based on the hardware that you have," http://csismtechnologies.com/
iOS 11's Beta Version Has A 'Cop Lock' Feature That Lets You Quickly Deactivate Your Touch ID Apple seems to be paying attention to the rising instances of law enforcement agencies abusing their power in the US. The company is giving its users an old way to protect themselves. It is now adding a quick way to disable your Touch ID in iOS 11. The new feature lets iPhone users tap the power button five times in quick succession to call emergency helplines. Take note, it doesn’t automatically dial for you. Instead, it brings up a quick menu where you can tap to dial, while also offering you the option to temporarily disable your Touch ID until you enter a passcode.

Microsoft Says Its Speech Recognition System Achieves New Accuracy Milestone

Microsoft's conversational speech recognition system - designed to accurately recognises the words in a conversation like humans do - has reached a 5.1 percent error rate, its lowest so far. This milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognise the words in a conversation as well as a person would. "Our research team reached that 5.1 percent error rate with our speech recognition system, a new industry milestone, substantially surpassing the accuracy we achieved last year,"  Microsoft  said in a blog post late on Sunday. Last year in October, the team from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The researchers had then reported a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent. "Last year, Microsoft's speech and dialog research group announced a milestone in reaching human parity on the 'Switchboard' con