Concerned PIA User - Is PIA tracking user history using nwjs?

concerned_pia_user

Hi PIA,

I have noticed executable called nwjs or pia_nw.exe and am looking to understand its purpose?

It appears this application is being used store website history, visited links, top sites, preferences and other configuration details.

The data is stored in the following location. C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\nwjs\User Data\Default

Can you explain why is PIA collecting this information and what are you doing with it?

Concerned User.

JasonV

This has actually been addressed by one of our team leads in another forum post.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/forum/discussion/22742/nwjs-suddenly-appears 

I hope this helps.

concerned_pia_user

Thanks PIAJason. I did do a search before i posted my question and come across that post but it doesn't explain nwjs or its function.

Why would PIA be logging personal data into the following text files?

 Favicons
 Favicons-journal
 History
 History-journal
 Login Data
 Login Data-journal
 Network Persistent State
 Preferences
 Secure Preferences
 Top Sites
 Top Sites-journal
 Visited Links
 Web Data
 Web Data-journal
 data_reduction_proxy_leveldb

Max-P

We are not logging nor storing anything in any of those files. They are just part of how the application works, which uses Chrome internally to run its GUI (the settings window is a web page). This browser is only ever used to display PIA's GUI and the tray icon, and therefore all of those files should be empty. Unfortunately Chrome requires to have a profile in order for it to display anything so that's why those files exist.

concerned_pia_user

Thanks for the response Max.

This is what I have been able to decipher..
If i delete C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\nwjs and restart PIA then the C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\nwjs folder gets recreated.

I setup auditing and it shows reads to the following directory when the app is started.  
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

If I delete C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data
then redo the steps then the C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\nwjs folder gets recreated without the user data.

Why would the app duplicate whats being stored in chrome folder when it has the ability to create its own in the event that Chrome\User Data folder doesnt exist?  

Max-P

Thanks for the heads up. I'll have a look at this to see what it does. This is an issue that have already came in the past, for which we pass the --no-first-run argument to Chromium to tell it not to do this, but it might not disable this anymore as Chromium updated. If it does, rest assured that we don't do anything with this data. As I already explained, we only use nwjs to display the GUI so if it has collected data this is purely accidental and I will pass it on to our dev team for fixing.