Invasive Israeli-founded bloatware is harvesting data from Samsung users in WANA
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’s A and M series smartphones. The bloatware cannot be uninstalled easily because it runs on the device’s 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. But the real concern lies in who owns AppCloud. When investigating further, we discovered that AppCloud’s privacy policy can be traced back to the controversial Israeli-founded company…
