Your cell phone does something worse than spying on you through the microphone

Researchers at Northeastern University of Massachusetts (United States) presented a study in which they warned against the presence of applications for Android devices that take screenshots to send them to third parties, such as GoPuff. 19659002] The research, which published the study, is trying to find out whether smartphone apps are secretly sending audio or video, for which they have analyzed more than 17,000 popular Android apps, including some belonging to Facebook and more than 8,000 who send information to the social network

In the document titled "Panoptism: characterization of audio and video filtering of Android applications", experts have analyzed in search of security risks in the Android apps, as well as software that requires unwarranted permissions or that shares images and videos with third parties without the knowledge of users.

About the latter In fact, researchers have discovered that there are applications that store and send phone screen recordings to third parties. However, in the study, they found no evidence that applications activate the microphone or send recordings without permission.

Of the 17,260 applications reviewed, more than 9,000 had permission to access the camera and microphone. some sent screenshots and video recordings to third-party domains.

An example is GoPuff, a messaging app for people with cravings that recorded user interactions and sent data to an affiliated domain of AppSee, a company dedicated to mobile analytics. In this case, the video sent included a screen in which personal information was entered.

After the discovery, the research team contacted GoPuff, so the company then added to its policies that AppSee could receive Personal Information Identifiable (PII) users and removed the AppSee SDK from their apps for iOS and Android.

In connection with this problem, the Google Play policy states that users must always be informed how they will collect their information, a practice that would not be fulfilled by applications such as GoPuff.

Researchers used for the study automated programs that performed actions on mobile phones, rather than on humans. In addition, during the first months of the survey, the terminals were close to university students and surrounded by conversations, but they were then isolated in a closet, which could have affected the findings of the study .

: ABC