Who is Bright Data? Into the "Create: Protection Pixel" junkware
Who is Bright Data? Into the "Create: Protection Pixel" junkware
Overview
Create: Protection Pixel is a popular Create addon with over half a million downloads. It is available on CurseForge and was formerly available on Modrinth; its page has now been taken down. It was made with MCreator.
Ever since version 1.1.2, the mod .jar bundles the Amplitude Java SDK under com.amplitude, and the org.json:json library (a dependency of Amplitude SDK) under org.json. Amplitude is a software analytics company. This is, obviously, unusual code to find in a Minecraft mod.
The mod also contains four classes placed under com.brightsdk: Device, Main, SessionTracker, and Storage.
The code under com.brightsdk does not appear to be correctly activated, but if it was correctly called, it would collect the following datapoints:
- your device vendor and platform,
- your operating system name and version,
- the total amount of RAM in your computer,
- the currently in-use amount of RAM,
- the current CPU usage,
and upload them (together with your IP address) to Amplitude's tracking URL at https://api2.amplitude.com/2/httpapi using the API key 7cce83b37fb5848cad6789d71a39b809. The code would send the data every minute at first, but gradually slow down to every 30 minutes.