Study confirms mobile phones are watching us

If you have ever suspected that your phone might be watching you, new research suggests that you can not be considered paranoid.

Researchers at Northwestern University, Boston, USA, were successful One year trying to determine if smartphone apps are recording our private conversations without permission to obtain and send personal data to advertisers, reports Gizmodo. The results of the study, meanwhile, have brought two new, one good: your phone does not listen (or at least not regularly), and another bad: you look.

According to the researchers, some applications of Smartphones record the video sequences of our screens, take screenshots of our activity, and then transmit them to third parties.

Boston scientists tested 17,260 popular Android apps, most of which belong to Facebook, and 8,000 others that send information directly to Facebook. The study revealed that more than half of the applications reviewed had "permission" to access users' cameras and even microphones, which means that they can enable these functions to some moment, provided that the application is open

Analysts used an automated system to interact with applications, looking for any multimedia file sent, especially to third-party domains

Thus, when the # One of the study phones used a food delivery application. GoPuff, the phone's interaction information with the application have been registered and sent to a third-party domain, affiliated with the Appsee mobile badysis company. The registration sent to this company even included the screen where users entered their postal code for delivery.

Appsee even posted the information received on its website, and complained to GoPuff's privacy policy of not having specified its users that Appsee had access to their personal data. After the investigation, the company's executive director, Zahi Boussiba, badured that Appsee "immediately disabled tracking capabilities" and eliminated all records from its servers.

The full study is expected to be presented at the Technology Symposium Symposium for the Improvement of Privacy, to be held in Barcelona, ​​Spain, next month.