Block Blast! has been downloaded 500 million times globally. Disney Solitaire sits on millions of family phones. These aren’t shady apps from unknown developers. They’re the games your kids play on the school bus. And according to new Proton research, many of them are quietly funneling your personal data to ad-tech companies based in Russia, China, and other countries with weak or nonexistent privacy laws.
What Proton actually studied
Proton examined the 100 most downloaded free mobile games on Google Play across multiple countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The research used tracker data from Exodus Privacy, an open-source platform that detects the code signatures of analytics, advertising, and profiling tools embedded in Android apps. The goal was straightforward: find out how many trackers these games carry, where the data goes, and how many people are actually affected.
The results are hard to ignore. In the US, 81% of the most downloaded games send data to Chinese entities, and 71% send data to Russian ones. In the UK, those figures are 84% and 74%. Some of the top games carry as many as 36 separate trackers. One game, Arrows Puzzle Escape, carries 30 trackers and includes a location tracker that sends real-time geographic data abroad.
The data being collected goes well beyond what most users expect
Proton is careful to note that these apps rarely disclose exactly what data they collect in practice. But the trackers themselves have the technical capacity to pull device identifiers, installed apps, usage patterns, location, age, gender, and payment information. Stack all of that together and you have a detailed behavioral profile of a real person, possibly a child.
The worst-case scenario is obvious: a game company with ties to an adversarial government hands that profile over, or is compelled to. But even the best-case scenario is not reassuring. Some opaque ad-tech firm simply knows more about you than it should, and that data sits in a database somewhere waiting to be breached. Neither outcome is acceptable.
The figures from the US study carry a specific added concern. Federal agencies including the FBI have admitted to buying location data from commercial data brokers, bypassing the warrant process entirely. If a free puzzle game is sending your location to a broker, that data has more potential buyers than most people realize.
Why 90% of data going to Five Eyes countries still matters
One data point cuts against any easy nationalism here: 98% of top US game downloads and 99% of UK ones send data to Five Eyes countries. So the problem is not simply that China and Russia are involved. It is that this data goes practically everywhere, with no meaningful accountability and minimal transparency about what happens to it once it leaves your device.
- US top games: 81% send data to China, 71% to Russia, 95% to Israel, 98% to Five Eyes nations
- UK top games: 84% send data to China, 74% to Russia, 95% to Israel, 99% to Five Eyes nations
- Some games carry up to 36 individual trackers
- Games with location trackers were downloaded over 1.7 million times in the US in a single month
The games covered in this research have been downloaded nearly 20 billion times globally. That scale makes this less a niche privacy problem and more a structural one. Free games are free because you are the product, and this research puts hard numbers on exactly how that works. The question is whether regulators, app stores, and users are ready to treat that as a problem worth fixing.