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Dolphin, a 3rd Party Android Browser, Relayed URL Data

Posted by Soulskill on from the question-of-intent dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from AndroidPolice.com: "As it turns out, Dolphin HD, one of the top browsers the Android platform has to offer, sends pretty much every web page URL you visit, including those that start with https, to a remote server en.mywebzines.com, which belongs to the company. In fact, the WebZines feature was introduced only recently back in June with version 6.0, so it's safe to say this tracking started around the same time.'" The Dolphin team quickly responded with a blog post saying they did not store any of the data, and no browsing information was captured about users. They also rolled out a new version of the browser, 7.0.2, which fixed the issue.

7 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Meaning... by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When they say "fix", does that mean it doesn't send the info, or their sending of info is harder to trace?

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  2. Been reading about this for a few days now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...over at xda-developers.com.

    http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1319529

    That was their good deed for the week. Now for the bad deed of the week, they refuse to remove an ARP poisoning app so people can kill individual users on public wifi networks: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1282900

    Probably worthy of it's own /. article.

  3. Re:One more proof walled garden is better by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dolphin is available for iOS and offers the same WebZines "feature" ;-)

  4. When Google does it, it's OK, when Dolphin does it by impaledsunset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is bad?

    How is that? Chrome already sends any URLs visited and anything you typed in the address bar to Google. The former is done to make a lookup in the database of malicious URLs (where other browsers such as Iceweasel store the database locally), the latter is done for the uses of Google Suggest.

  5. Shocking! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Android users signed up to be spied on by Google, not some random third party!

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  6. Re:"Fixes" the issue? by Raenex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real fix is uninstalling this app because they abused your trust.

  7. Re:When Google does it, it's OK, when Dolphin does by SharkLaser · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But Google IS NOT upfront about that, and it doesn't even ask if they are allowed to do so. It's enabled by default and without telling the user about it.