These applications that send your data to Russia

Using apps on our phones is accept – whether we like it or not – that our data is analyzed. This will allow advertising companies to bombard us with business proposals that sometimes almost seem to result from reading our minds. This is the game and without it there would be no free applications. “If it’s free, you’re the product” as Shakespeare said (source Wikipedia). The real problem is above all to know who receives our information, even more so when we discover that they are sent to Russia.

Money change

This is indeed what reveals an article from FinancialTimes dated March 29. But beware, nothing to do here with any malware or espionage. No, everything is legal and under control. This data collection is simply the fruit of a Russian software called AppMetrica, present in nearly 50,000 applications available on iOS and Android. This development kit is made freely available to companies by Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google. It allows the integration of features that are almost vital nowadays, from cartography to the payment service, including the notification system and many others. Suffice to say that it is a boon on which it is easy to jump for developers looking for an easy solution and what is more free. However, the pact contains a quid pro quo since Yandex receives in exchange access to user data. This represents a staggering mountain of information that probably does not fall into the right hands.

🚨Scoop in @FT 🚨

Millions of American and European smartphone users are unknowingly sending user, device and IP address information to servers in Russia.

From there, researchers worry it might be accessed by the Kremlin.

Wait whhaaaat???

*Tweet thread follows* pic.twitter.com/XOD4NdfWue

— Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_) March 29, 2022

Next stop: the Kremlin?

Yandex is indeed a company which, by common knowledge and by force of circumstance, is very close to the Kremlin. In 2009, it was obliged to integrate Russian decision-makers on its board of directors before its IPO. Since 2016, any content deemed inappropriate by the Roskomnadzor must even be removed by the program. When you know that your search engine is used by 45% of Russians in their territory (against 51% for Google), we say that the impact on society is phenomenal.

The data it recovers are thus stored on servers in Finland but also, of course, in Russia. According to appfiguresAppMetrica would be incorporated into 36% of Play Store apps and 11% of App Store apps. We therefore find it at the heart of video games, messaging applications, VPNs and many others in all styles. It would thus be millions of smartphones that would be caught in the invisible nets of Yandex. In France, the software that came from the cold is present for example in the Blablacar, Helix Jump, Adidas, RTL radio or Cut the Ropes applications.

So, yes, the Russian company does nothing worse than Google on paper, but at a time when sanctions are raining down on Vladimir Putin’s country after its attack on Ukraine, perhaps it’s time for businesses that use AppMetrica to find an alternative. Which is already the case of Reverso and Akinator apps who turned to other solutions from the start of the conflict, as they told our colleagues from Numerama.