The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked app stores to remove apps exposed during the 315 Party

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Last night, CCTV's 315 Gala exposed violations such as "inducing the elderly to download APPs" and "APPs illegally collecting personal information of the elderly".

Today, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a document stating that in response to the four APPs, namely Memory Optimization Master, Smart Cleaning Master, Super Cleaning Master, and Mobile Manager Pro, which were exposed at the "3.15" Gala of China Central Radio and Television in 2021, our department immediately organized technical inspections and found that they had deceived and misled users to download and illegally processed personal information. We have requested major application stores to remove them from the shelves, and organized the Communications Administration Bureaus of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangdong to investigate and deal with the companies involved.

In the previous special rectification campaign, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered 300 apps to rectify, 37 apps to be publicly reported, and 3 apps to be removed from the shelves for deceiving and misleading users to download. It also ordered 75 mobile phone managers, memory optimization, and garbage cleaning apps to rectify, 20 apps to be publicly reported, and 1 app to be removed from the shelves for illegally handling personal information.

At the same time, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology attaches great importance to the work of making Internet applications suitable for the elderly. In accordance with the relevant requirements of the State Council's "Implementation Plan on Effectively Solving the Difficulties of Intelligent Technology for the Elderly", it launched the "Special Action for Internet Application Adaptation for the Elderly and Accessible Transformation" in January 2021. The first batch of 158 websites and APPs commonly used by the elderly were guided to complete the transformation. In response to the problem of "too many forced advertisements that easily mislead the elderly", the transformed APP versions are required to no longer have advertising plug-ins.

At the CCTV 315 Gala, apps such as "Memory Optimization Master", "Super Cleaning Master", "Smart Cleaning Master", and "Mobile Manager PRO" were named.

Recently, experts from the Cyber ​​Security Center of the China Institute of Electronics Standardization conducted a monitoring operation and found that in a novel reading software, a "safe cleaning" prompt appeared during the normal reading process. After the staff clicked it, they downloaded and installed an app called "Memory Optimization Master". During the automatic cleaning process, a "clean up mobile cache" reminder continued to pop up. After clicking it, the phone downloaded and installed the "Super Cleaning Master".

The same path of "reminding, downloading, and cleaning" is repeated continuously, and then "Smart Cleaning Master" and "Mobile Manager PRO" are installed on the mobile phone.

However, after testing Mobile Manager PRO, testers found that while it appears to be cleaning up mobile phone junk on the surface, it is actually secretly collecting large amounts of information from the phone.

Staff reminder: These data and information are used to create user profiles for the elderly, labeling them as a group that is "easily misled and induced."

As a result, all kinds of vulgar, low-quality, and even deceptive advertisements and content will be continuously pushed to the elderly’s mobile phones, causing some elderly people to be deceived.