A Google Chrome extension with a “Featured” badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity.

The extension in question is Urban VPN Proxy, which has a 4.7 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store. It’s advertised as the “best secured Free VPN access to any website, and unblock content.” Its developer is a Delaware-based company named Urban Cyber Security Inc. On the Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace, it has 1.3 million installations.

Sources:
The Hacker News: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/featured-chrome-browser-extension.html

KOI AI: https://www.koi.ai/blog/urban-vpn-browser-extension-ai-conversations-data-collection

#chrome #privacy #cybersecurity