- Urban VPN Proxy started harvesting AI chatbot prompts and responses after a July 2025 update
- Collected data, including metadata and conversation IDs, is shared with BIScience for ad analysis
- Several related urban extensions perform the same data collection on a large scale
A popular Google Chrome browser extension has been found to harvest everything its users have asked for in most of the major AI tools, as well as collect the chatbot’s responses, all apparently to earn a few extra bucks for its owners.
Urban VPN Proxy has more than six million installs and a 4.7/5 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store – and on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons Marketplace, it has another 1.3 million installs.
It used to work like your regular VPN – by hiding the user’s actual IP address and thus working around geoblocks and other various restrictions. However, as Koi security researchers discovered, on July 9, 2025, the extension was updated with version 5.5.0, which introduced AI harvesting by default.
Privacy Policy Updates
Everything users typed into ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity would be captured, as well as anything those tools returned. Furthermore, the extension also extracted conversation IDs, timestamps, session metadata, and which AI platform and model was used.
The company behind the extension, called Urban Cyber Security, doesn’t hide its practices, noting in its privacy policy document how it harvests “anonymized” data and shares it with BIScience — another company it owns.
This company is an affiliate advertising intelligence and brand monitoring organization. In other words, it analyzes anonymized online behavior at scale, helping companies understand advertising performance, consumer journeys and competitive activity.
While Urban says it removes personally identifiable data and does its best not to share sensitive information, the company stresses that this cannot be guaranteed.
“However, the purpose of this processing is not to collect personal or identifiable data, we cannot fully guarantee the removal of all sensitive or personal information, we implement measures to filter out or eliminate any identifiers or personal data you may submit through the prompts and to de-identify and aggregate the data,” the privacy policy reads.
Koi researchers said the same company has several extensions that all harvest the same data – 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard and Urban Ad Blocker.
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