Mobile phones can spy on you by means of screen shots

By estrategiaynegocios.net

Companies are looking for more and more digital advertising to reach their audience, so the best allies for this purpose are mobile phones, but how does it spy on me?

Signatures such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, among others, are dedicated to the development of this technique that finds resistance among users who want to slow down personalized records.

With more sophisticated devices and permanent connections to the Internet, smartphones and applications were under the microscope after suspecting to record the voices of users to apply the same technique to personalized reviews; however, one study indicates that the culprits are other, screen captures.

Facebook had to leave to clarify the doubts on the subject and confirmed that the social network does not use the microphone of the cellular telephone to send opinions or modify which can be seen in the calendar with the publications of friends.

With this starting point, a group of researchers from the Northeast University decided to start Mobile applications use the microphone of an Android phone to capture the audio. The study badyzed more than 17,000 applications, where the mobile version of Facebook is found with more than 8,000 development that send information to the social network, according to an article published on the Gizmodo website.

With an automated program that interacted with 10 Android phones, the researchers badyzed the traffic generated by the applications and found no evidence of unauthorized use of the microphone or audio recording performed without authorization.

The researchers specify that the limitations perform a study with an automated program does not allow you to perform actions of human users, such as the creation of user names and pbadwords to create an online service or application.

The Northeastern University report found that some apps take a screenshot and send the file to a third party, such as the GoPuff mobile app, which via a video to a digital marketing company for badyze personal information entered by the user, such as the postal code.

The final report will be presented by the researchers of the conference on privacy protection technology to be held in Barcelona

In turn, the researchers were not decisive as to unauthorized use of microphones, since the methodology based on an automated program does not cover all the variations of use made by a human user.

"We have no evidence that conversations of Android phone users are recorded in secret," said David Choffnes, one of the study's authors, adding that tracking systems are very sophisticated and not only they involve visible components of a phone, such as the camera or microphone. "Even without these resources, companies have many other forms of follow-up to make a very comprehensive profile of people," added the specialist.