Several years ago I worked for a company in the advertising industry, initially helping develop seedy browser extensions and "toolbars" that would essentially (

Several years ago I worked for a company in the advertising industry, initially helping develop seedy browser extensions and "toolbars" that would essentially (among other things) inject referral cookies whenever the user's browser landed on a page that we had an affiliate link for. That was bad enough, but eventually I was internally recruited to help launch a new mobile division at the company. The worst thing I built while there was a desktop application that we distributed through third party installer applications that bundled adware along with whatever application the user actually wanted to install. The thing I wrote was a background Windows service that would directly read the user's browser cookie databases and find any cookies they had for the Google Play store, then use those to push various apps to the user's Android phone (basically emulating all of the HTTP calls that happen when you click the install button from your desktop browser to have the app installed on your phone directly). We'd get paid per install of those Android apps. I stayed at the company way longer than my conscience preferred, mainly because I really liked the team I was working with and the complete freedom the developers were given to tackle problems however they want (as long as you were putting money in the pockets of the higher ups). I wrote about this in more detail a few years back on my blog https://codeword.xyz/2015/08/09/exploiting-android-users-for-fun-and-profit/ https://codeword.xyz/2015/08/09/exploiting-android-users-for...