{"id":225196,"date":"2025-11-16T04:10:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T10:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/invasive-israeli-founded-bloatware-is-harvesting-data-from-samsung-users-in-wana"},"modified":"2025-11-16T04:10:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T10:10:06","slug":"invasive-israeli-founded-bloatware-is-harvesting-data-from-samsung-users-in-wana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/invasive-israeli-founded-bloatware-is-harvesting-data-from-samsung-users-in-wana","title":{"rendered":"Invasive Israeli-founded bloatware is harvesting data from Samsung users in WANA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/invasive-israeli-founded-bloatware-is-harvesting-data-from-samsung-users-in-wana2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>IronSource Expands Samsung Partnership, Launching on Samsung Mobile Devices in MENA <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businesswire.com\/news\/home\/20221103005106\/en\/ironSource-Expands-Samsung-Partnership-Launching-on-Samsung-Mobile-Devices-in-MENA\">https:\/\/www.businesswire.com\/news\/home\/20221103005106\/en\/iro\u2026es-in-MENA<\/a><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Across West Asia and North Africa (WANA), growing concerns about digital surveillance have placed Israeli cybersecurity firms and their software under intense scrutiny. Among the most alarming cases is AppCloud, a pre-installed application on Samsung\u2019s A and M series smartphones.<\/p>\n<p>The bloatware cannot be uninstalled easily because it runs on the device\u2019s operating system. Uninstalling it requires root access (the highest level of control in a computer system) of the phone to remove the AppCloud package. Its privacy policy is nowhere to be found online and opting out is not always available.<\/p>\n<p>But the real concern lies in who owns AppCloud. When investigating further,<strong> we discovered that AppCloud\u2019s privacy policy can be traced back to the <\/strong>controversial Israeli-founded company <a href=\"https:\/\/www.is.com\/\">ironSource<\/a> (now owned by the American company <a href=\"https:\/\/investors.unity.com\/news\/news-details\/2022\/Unity-Announces-Merger-Agreement-with-ironSource\/default.aspx\">Unity<\/a>). ironSource is notorious for its questionable practices regarding user consent and data privacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IronSource Expands Samsung Partnership, Launching on Samsung Mobile Devices in MENA https:\/\/www.businesswire.com\/news\/home\/20221103005106\/en\/iro\u2026es-in-MENA Across West Asia and North Africa (WANA), growing concerns about digital surveillance have placed Israeli cybersecurity firms and their software under intense scrutiny. Among the most alarming cases is AppCloud, a pre-installed application on Samsung\u2019s A and M series smartphones. The bloatware cannot [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1512,31,1511],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-mobile-phones","category-policy","category-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}