PrivacyHigh
Urban VPN Proxy Browser Extension Reportedly Harvested and Sold Private AI Chatbot Conversations via Silent Update
- Occurred
- Jul 9, 2025
- Published
- Dec 16, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Security researchers reported that the Urban VPN Proxy browser extension introduced AI conversation–harvesting functionality in version 5.5.0, released July 9, 2025. The extension allegedly intercepted and exfiltrated private conversations from AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others without a user-facing opt-out. The data, including sensitive personal and financial information, was reportedly shared with affiliated data brokers for commercial analytics.
Developers
- Urban Cyber Security
- BiScience
Deployers
- Urban Cyber Security
Harmed parties
- Urban VPN Proxy users
- Privacy
- Perplexity users
- Meta AI users
- Grok users
- General public
- Gemini users
- DeepSeek users
- Copilot users
- Claude users
- ChatGPT users
- Chatbot users
- Browser extension users
- Chatbot developers
- Large language model developers
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Unauthorized data collection and exfiltration of private AI conversations without consent constitutes a significant privacy violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8