My Sweeps Tab

My Sweeps Tab is a classical Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) developed to hijack Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari or other web browsers. My Sweeps Tab changes the URLs of homepages and the new tab to hp.hmysweepstab.com and appends a custom search engine directing all queries to Yahoo over the original settings.

Some users may end up installing My Sweeps Tab through the Google Web Store intentionally, but most may find the extension installed after they download freeware from third-party websites. That is the reason why the extension is considered a PUP. My Sweeps Tab also may ask users to allow notifications, which is another way for the extension to promote advertisements.

Much like similar extensions of this kind, My Sweeps Tab claims to have allegedly useful features. Such applications are following the theme of appealing to users, appending various links to websites used for recipes, weather, games and other topics.

My Sweeps Tab developers are claiming that the purpose of their application is to access popular sweepstakes, bingo, and lottery websites quickly. The application also appends links to popular websites providing information on weather and other useful features. The links that allow quick access have already been implemented by modern browsers, so people can customize their websites as they see fit, making the feature pointless.

While the developers claim to care about the user searches, they use Yahoo for advertisements, monetizing clicks on said advertisements. My Sweeps Tab collects browsing information on the users, as explained in their Privacy Policy.

"We may collect information from you based on information collected resulting from your use of our Services and information that you provide to us. The information collected may include both Non-Personal Information and Personal Information.

The gathered data includes:

• Name, email, phone number, if such is provided;
• Hardware model and the operating system type;
• IP address;
• Internet Service Provider;
• Geolocation;
• Browser settings;
• Bookmarks, etc."

The collected information also is shared with business partners, affiliates, trade providers and third parties. Users worried about their privacy may remove My Sweeps Tab to avoid the risk.