Trend Micro Apps are removed from the App Store for collecting data

Apple has been forced to remove several applications from its Mac App Store from Trend Micro security provider, because they collected data from their users without their consent. Among the applications removed are the following: Dr Cleaner, Dr Cleaner Pro, Dr Antivirus, Dr Unarchiver, App Uninstall, Dr Battery and Duplicate Finder.

In December 2017, a user of the Malwarebytes forum already detected suspicious behaviour, which was confirmed by Patrick Wardle, CEO and founder of Digita Security; a security researcher based in Germany who uses the name on Twitter @privacyis1st; and Thomas Reed, director of Mac and mobile devices at Malwarebytes Labs.

Trend Micro blames this functionality on the reuse of the code libraries and claimed that the applications loaded a small snapshot of the browsing history of the last 24 hours for security reasons.