Enlarge / Photo taken on October 12, 2021 in Moscow shows Russia’s internet search engine Yandex’s logo on a laptop screen. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images) (credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev | Getty Images)
Russia’s biggest Internet company has embedded code into apps found on mobile devices that allows information about millions of users to be sent to servers located in its home country.
The revelation relates to software created by Yandex that permits developers to create apps for devices running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, systems that run the vast majority of the world’s smartphones.
Yandex collects user data harvested from mobiles, before sending the information to servers in Russia. Researchers have raised concerns the same “metadata” may then be accessed by the Kremlin and used to track people through their mobiles.
