The researchers have found no evidence that your phone is recording you secretly. But they found that some applications secretly record your screen, Business Insider

• A new study from Northeastern University has found no evidence that your phone is secretly recording you to deliver targeted commercials – a long-standing conspiracy theory.
• But the researchers found at least one case in which an application was sending recordings and screenshots to a third party mobile analytics company.
• The study had limitations, and so the researchers stopped just before categorically declaring that phones never secretly record anyone. They found no evidence in their scientific study.

Researchers at Northeastern University found no evidence that your phone was secretly recording you to serve targeted advertisements – a long-standing conspiracy theory that even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before Congress earlier this year.

The researchers, on the contrary, have found something that could be just as scary, Gizmodo reported. In some cases, they found that your phone was recording your screen and sending it to third parties.

The findings come from a study conducted last year to test the ubiquitous conspiracy theory that device users secretly record. The theory has become so popular because users often say that they have real-life conversations mentioning a product, only to have an advertisement for that product on Facebook later.

Researchers will show the results of the study at the Privacy Enhancing Conference on the Technology Symposium in Barcelona next month.

Researchers monitored 17,260 of the most popular Android apps, including those that send information to Facebook, using an automated program that interacts with apps, and notes the media files that were sent to them.

these applications turned on the phone's microphone spontaneously and sent audio. But they discovered that some apps were sending screen recordings and screenshots to third parties.

In one example, Gizmodo reported that the popular GoPuff delivery application was recording and sending screen recordings to a mobile analytics company called AppSee. The developers of the GoPuff application included a line code, or SDK, that allows AppSee to collect data from GoPuff.

Although this practice is widespread, many applications use analytics companies to improve application performance. The privacy policy of GoPuff who mentioned it. After being contacted by the researchers, GoPuff would have updated its privacy policy and removed the AppSee SDK.

Indeed, AppSee presents itself as a way to keep an eye on the users of an application. But the CEO of AppSee told Gizmodo that the company's conditions precluded customers from tracking all personal data and that customers had to disclose that they were using them.

The study notes however limitations, and researchers have not stated that phones never secretly record users – just that they have found no evidence of that. It is certainly possible that applications like Facebook use a new, unknown method to do it, but it is hard to imagine how this would escape the attention of researchers.