{"id":357335,"date":"2025-12-19T02:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T02:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/357335\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T02:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T02:20:08","slug":"millions-of-private-chatgpt-conversations-are-being-harvested-and-sold-for-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/357335\/","title":{"rendered":"Millions of Private ChatGPT Conversations Are Being Harvested and Sold for Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\"Over<\/p>\n

\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n

You know those memes<\/a> about how there\u2019s no such thing as a free VPN? Here\u2019s the ultimate cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

A recent investigation<\/a> by Tel Aviv-based security firm Koi uncovered a massive data harvesting operation tied to a voluntary extension on Google\u2019s Chrome browser. Called Urban VPN Proxy, the free extension has some six million users at the time of writing, and even a \u201cfeatured\u201d badge on the Chrome Web Store \u2014 in other words, an endorsement from Google itself.<\/p>\n

As Koi researcher Idan Dardikman writes, the extension goes beyond the actions of a typical VPN. Packed under the hood are \u201cexecutor\u201d scripts designed to intercept and capture conversations from the leading AI platforms, including OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, Google\u2019s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI\u2019s Grok.<\/p>\n

The data collected encompasses anything a user might ask their chosen AI chatbot, per Dardikman, including \u201cmedical questions, financial details, proprietary code, personal dilemmas, all of it, sold for \u2018marketing analytics purposes.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether the VPN is on or off, Urban VPN Proxy is constantly scraping conversation data. The script is enabled by default, meaning that from the moment someone downloads the extension, their chatbot gabbing is fair game. <\/p>\n

Worse yet, Forbes notes<\/a>, \u201cthere is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.\u201d <\/p>\n

The company behind Urban VPN Proxy, Urban Cyber Security Inc, isn\u2019t shy about any of this. As Dardikman observes, the company\u2019s privacy policy explicitly states that \u201cwe share the Web Browsing Data with our affiliated company,\u201d a data broker called BiScience, \u201cthat uses this raw data and creates insights which are commercially used and shared with business partners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite this, Urban VPN Proxy\u2019s page on the Chrome Web Store<\/a> declares that \u201cyour data is not being sold to third parties, outside of the\u00a0approved use cases,\u201d and \u201cnot being used or transferred for purposes that are unrelated to the item\u2019s core functionality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though the revelation might be startling for the six million users of Urban VPN Proxy, it\u2019s surely not the only app running this scheme. Indeed, Forbes notes there are over two million customers across seven additional apps by the same publisher, each with \u201cidentical AI harvesting functionality.\u201d All but one of them carry a \u201cfeatured\u201d badge courtesy of Google\u2019s Chrome Web Store.<\/p>\n

As Koi\u2019s Dardikman writes, \u201cif you have any of these extensions installed, uninstall them now. Assume any AI conversations you\u2019ve had since July 2025 have been captured and shared with third parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if your apps weren\u2019t developed by this company, it might be a good time to start combing through their own privacy policies for similar scraping permissions. As Dardikman has shown, when it comes to data harvesting, all bets are off.<\/p>\n

More on data privacy: Regular People Are Rising Up Against AI Surveillance Cameras<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images You know those memes about how there\u2019s no such…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-357335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}