Urban VPN Proxy Extension Harvested Private AI Chatbot Conversations
Urban VPN Proxy, a browser extension with over 6 million users, reportedly harvested private conversations from eight major AI platforms through a silent update in July 2025 and sold the data to a commercial monitoring company. Users had no way to disable the data collection, which captured prompts, responses, and metadata despite the extension's positioning as a privacy tool.
What happened
On July 9, 2025, Urban VPN Proxy released version 5.5.0 with a silent update that began harvesting private conversations from eight major AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.
The extension injected scripts into these AI platforms to capture user prompts, AI responses, conversation identifiers, timestamps, session metadata, and information about which AI platform and model was used. The data collection operated by default with no user-facing toggle to disable it.
Urban Cyber Security, the company behind the extension, shared the harvested data with BIScience, an affiliated ad intelligence and brand monitoring organization owned by the same parent company, reportedly for commercial purposes.
Reported impact
Urban VPN Proxy had over 6 million installations on the Google Chrome Web Store and 1.3 million on Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace at the time of discovery. Users unknowingly had their private AI conversations intercepted while believing they were using a privacy-focused VPN.
Security researchers noted that the extension was featured by Google and carried a 4.7-star rating based on 58,000 reviews, giving users false assurance that the tool met high standards for user experience and security.
Index analysis
The company's privacy policy stated it removed personally identifiable information, but acknowledged it 'cannot fully guarantee the removal of all sensitive or personal information' and that filters implemented to de-identify data may not eliminate all personal details from user prompts.
Koi security researchers discovered the extension targeted multiple AI platforms through dedicated script injectors for each service, enabling continuous harvesting regardless of whether the VPN functionality was active.
Governance controls
Urban Cyber Security disclosed the data harvesting practice in updated privacy policy documentation, characterizing the data as 'anonymized' before sharing with BIScience. However, the company acknowledged it could not fully guarantee removal of sensitive information from the harvested conversations.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.