Phones do not listen to private conversations, but some may spy on you with screen shots

Movements users in various online sites and services are closely monitored by technology to bring digital advertising to the right audience. Signatures like


Google



Facebook
and


Microsoft
among others, are engaged in perfecting this technique which finds
resistance among users who want to curb personalized advice.

With more sophisticated devices and permanent connections


Internet
the


smart phones
and applications were under the microscope after the suspicion of registering the voices of users to apply the same technique of personalized notice. Some users said they were surprised at advertising about a product or service after talking about a related problem.

For this reason, Facebook had to go out to dispel the doubts on the subject and confirm that the social network did not use the microphone of the cell phone to send notices or modify what can be seen in the calendar with the publications of friends.

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

With an automated program that interacted with ten Android phones, the researchers badyzed the traffic generated by the applications and found no evidence of unauthorized use of the microphone or microphone. 39, an audio recording made without authorization. 19659012] The researchers point out that the limitations of running a study with an automated program do not allow the performance of user actions, such as creating user names and pbadwords to add to an online service or application. However, the report of
Northeastern University has detected that some apps are performing a screen capture and sending the file to a third party, such as the GoPuff mobile app, which sends a video to a digital marketing company to badyze the personal information entered by the user, such as the postal code

Thus, the result of the report that sought to test whether a mobile application was using the microphone without authorization revealed that some developers use techniques that can compromise the privacy of users during Image captures or video of the user's activity on the smartphone screen. The final report will be presented by the researchers at the conference
The privacy protection technology that will be realized in Barcelona next month

The researchers were not decisive in the unauthorized use of microphones, because the methodology based on an automated program does not not cover all the variations of use made by a human user.

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