The year was 2014. Applications for playing on smartphones and tablets were experiencing their golden age. Among the most popular in Italy were «My talking Tom» and his friend «My talking Angela», two kittens to take care of and interact with. Digital gaming was the protagonist of one of the most successful hoaxes throughout the country: many believed that users were being spied on through the eyes of the two cats.
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Today, in 2026, there is an application used to control people. This is what has been discovered on the Russian platform Max, downloaded by tens of millions of Russians who were forced to do so. No fake news this time.
In the last 18 months, Russian authorities have promoted the application as a patriotic alternative to Telegram and WhatsApp, with media support from celebrities like the singer Instasamka, who has 5 million followers on Instagram. The promotional operations of Max have made it the most used messaging application in Russia.
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Max is a “super-app” that brings together an ecosystem of services designed to facilitate the daily life of Russian citizens; not only exchanging SMS, but also payments, news consumption, and access to government services. The product is the offspring of the Russian social media company VKontakte, a company in which President Vladimir Putin holds an indirect stake.
The discovery
The alarm about the surveillance action carried out by the Max application comes from an investigation conducted by the working team of Roya Ensafi, associate professor of computer science at the University of Michigan.
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