A worrying privacy flaw has been discovered in newer versions of the Dolphin HD browser for Android:

Discussions in the XDA forums and a report published on the Android Police blog yesterday revealed that every URL loaded in Dolphin HD is relayed as plain text to a remote server. The article includes screenshots from a packet sniffer that clearly demonstrate the issue—it’s an unambiguous breach of privacy.

In response to the resulting controversy, the company behind Dolphin issued a statement explaining the situation. Recent versions of Dolphin introduced a feature called Webzine that offers a specialized presentation of websites. When a user visits a website, the URL is relayed to Dolphin’s servers which determine whether the Webzine view is supported for the specified destination. The company contends that the data is not collected or retained. It subsequently issued an update to disable the feature and said that it will be made opt-in in future versions.

Comment via this identi.ca conversation.

A worrying privacy flaw has been discovered in newer versions of the Dolphin HD browser for Android: Discussions in the XDA forums and a report published on the Android Police blog yesterday revealed that every URL loaded in Dolphin HD is relayed as plain text to a remote server. The article includes screenshots from a packet sniffer that ...